At the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group meeting on January 17, 2010, Roy Tennant of OCLC Research spoke of OCLC’s Cloud Library project, which provides large-scale data comparison and analysis of NYU’s print monograph holdings with the HathiTrust repository, NYU’s ReCAP off campus shelving collection, and the WorldCat database. OCLC Cloud Library mashup of these different metadata streams is to provide NYU with useful information so that it can determine the proportion of the local collection that may be more cost-effectively sourced from alternative service providers while satisfying current service expectations of library patrons and staff. The project identified public domain vs. in copyright materials in humanities subjects since most Hathi materials are humanities based. Questions about managing print collections being considered are:
* Will large off campus shelving and delivery services continue to provide a cost-effective solution to the challenge of managing a local physical inventory that is (increasingly) duplicated in digital format?
* Can a library think about moving items to storage and descessioning if titles are in the HathiTrust?
* Can cooperative service models reduce costs and increase efficiencies in managing local print collections?
* What requirements are needed to sustain long-term business partnerships and operational workflows between academic libraries and shared collection service providers?
* What kinds of organizational and economic models are needed to sustain ‘Web-scale’ collection management regimes?
* Can Web-scale management services provide greater cost benefit to libraries?
Jennifer Bowen, University of Rochester, shared insights of the Metadata Services Toolkit (MST), one of three modules under development by the University of Rochester as part of the eXtensible Catalog (XC – http://www.extensiblecatalog.org). The MST open-source platform for automating the processing of large batches of metadata in any XML-based schema. This open source toolkit enables a library to synchronize metadata from multiple repositories. Specifically, it has its own faceted interface that
*enables libraries to automatically process batches of metadata
* can be used by other front-end systems, e.g., Summon, Primo-—is designed to serve as a middle layer for any system that can harvest data
* has services to clean up and normalize inconsistent metadata (currently handles MARC and DC, but ultimately can be extended to any XML metadata), transforms metadata from one schema to another, aggregates records that represent the same resource so that the library can manage relationships between FRBR levels, as well as provides authority control, i.e., matching headings against MARCXML authority file and then populate records with the proper authoritative form/identifier.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Hidden Collections Symposium
On March 29 and 30, I attended the Hidden Collections Program Symposium in Washington, DC. The Hidden Collections program--officially its title is Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Building a New Research Environment--is administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Its goal is to identify and catalog collections of national significance that are currently invisible to researchers, with the complementary aims of applying description standards that provide interoperability and long-term sustainability for project data and designing streamlined work-flow processes.
The symposium offered grantee institutions the chance to present information about the progress of their projects, share solutions and ask questions. I was there as part of a team that is conducting a parallel study of the projects, called “Observations on Scholarly Engagement with Hidden Special Collections and Archives.” We are looking at the grant projects as an opportunity to learn more about how special collections librarians and curators conduct outreach and work with scholars--and to think about innovative ways to carry out these essential activities. So, during the symposium, we facilitated a workshop asking participants for feedback on our observations to date and ideas about how to implement some of our recommendations.
Image: Portolan atlas of the Mediterranean Sea, western Europe, and the northwest coast of Africa. Attributed to Joan Oliva, ca. 1590. Library of Congress Map Collection. The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division was one of the recipients of a Hidden Collections grant in 2008, for their project cataloging multi-sheet maps of Africa.
The three things I learned that were most interesting:
1. Catalogers are hungry for community. A lot of enthusiastic networking took place! 2009 grant recipients sought out advice from 2008 recipients; recipients working on specific formats (posters, photographs, audio archives) were eager to meet each other; break-out sessions were full of Q and A. The meeting was so successful in this respect that CLIR is now thinking about ways to build this sense of community.
2. Catalogers around the country are developing technological solutions to all kinds of problems, from customizing Archivists’ Toolkit to adapting Office and Google software to processing needs. One particularly interesting idea: using WordPress + CommentPress to solicit user contributions to help with the identification of arcane Islamic manuscripts.
3. If you introduce persuasive new vocabulary to catalogers, they will run with it! Our study team started talking about “scholarly engagement” to describe a range of activities in which collaboration produces new knowledge, and “emerging scholars” to describe the students who often work as cataloging assistants. By the end of the two days, these terms had become a regular part of the conversation.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
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).
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
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