NISO Forum on discovery to delivery

NISO forum on discovery to Delivery was help at Atlanta on March 23. There are about 50 people attended the one day forum, I have had chance to talk with several speakers and participants, and had some good discussions. This is a brief report.

1. OpenURL and seamless access to resources. (by Phil Norman of OCLC, and Adam Chandler of Cornell).

Phil Norman of OCLC represented the OCLC leaded NISO project of OpenUrl registry. The purpose of the project is to improve discovery and delivery services to library’s user by creating the OpenURL Registry and to register each community’s knowledgebase, user request can be referred or transferred for the object context.

Adam Chandler of Cornell raised the question of openurl metadata quality control issue. Openurl become the only way for user to find the text, and if there is some errors in the metadata part of the url, the deliverer the full text will fail. There are millions of openurl out there, and the project of OpenUrl quality initiative (initialized by Cornell, Columbia, EBSCO, Thomson Reuters, and George Tech) will use a metrics to analysis individual openurl, before user encountered the broken link. Adam welcomes more academic libraries to participate and use the link http://openurlquality.niso.org/ to send in their openurl resolver’s log file, this way, any failed openurl request will be collected and analyzed.

2. SSO (single sign on)

Harry Kaplanian of Serials Solutions gave a status report on NISO SSO authentication optimization workgroup. Discovery tools have pushed the single sign on from one organization to multiple organizations, and from university environment to mixed of academic and databases industry. User should be challenged with one time authentication during a session, and the rest should be taking care of when user visit or transfer to different sites, and/or for different level of services. User should not need to know what does Athens or Shibboleth mean, and if their organization belongs to what federation to allow access to the materials they try to access. The work group will create recommended practices that will improve the user experience, providing consistency, improved usability, and an SSO experience across a set of distributed service providers.

3. bX Recommender server (by Nettie Lagace of Exlibris)

I had some discussion with Nettie Lagace during the NISO forum, and have a better understanding on how bX works. During a session, the full text services links clicked by a user will be used as the base of the relevancy for recommender when the log file sent to bX service host. The relevancy will be improved greatly if more peer institutes participate, and the user cases cumulates.

Currently JHU can only participate as a subscriber to the services, not as contributor to bX, because the tool we currently used on top of sfx openurl resolver will not update sfx log file that records usage data and needed by bX.

As the past NISO sessions, the presentation materials can be found at NISO meeting site under each session title. http://www.niso.org/news/events/2010/d2d/agenda