Science Library Pad

two perspectives on interoperability and what it could enable

In case you're wondering, I finally managed to clear my Bloglines backlog, including the published literature, D-Lib and Ariadne.  I found two very different, but complementary views on how service standards and standard interfaces can enable an enhanced scholarly workflow or other advanced combinations of services.

In Serving Services in Web 2.0 (Ariadne issue 47, April 2006, ISSN  1361-3200), Theo van Veen of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands explores and explains some fundamental concepts of Service-Oriented Architecture and standard service interfaces.

In this article I discuss the ingredients that enable users to benefit from a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by combining services according to their preferences. ... This concept is an extrapolation of the use of OpenURL and goes beyond linking to an appropriate copy. Publishing and formalising these service descriptions lowers the barrier for users wishing to build their own knowledge base, makes it fun to integrate services and will contribute to the standardisation of existing non-standard services.

In An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains (D-Lib, October 2006, Volume 12 Number 10, ISSN 1082-9873), Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze et al explore how you can build services using an interoperable network of digital object repositories

This article describes an interoperability fabric among a wide variety of heterogeneous repositories holding managed collections of scholarly digital objects. These digital objects are considered units of scholarly communication, and scholarly communication is seen as a global, cross-repository workflow. The proposed interoperability fabric includes a shared data model to represent digital objects, a common format to serialize those objects into network-transportable surrogates, three core repository interfaces that support surrogates (obtain, harvest, put) and some shared infrastructure. This article also describes an experiment implementing an overlay journal in which this interoperability fabric was tested across four different repository architectures (aDORe, arXiv, DSpace, Fedora).

Google Sitemaps using OAI-PMH

OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)

Google [Sitemaps] accepts the OAI-PMH version 2.0 protocol. You can't use this format for Mobile Sitemaps. If you use this format for your site, simply add  the baseURL of your OAI repository (for instance, http://www.example.com/oaiserver). When we query the baseURL, we automatically  add query parameters (such as ?verb=Identify or ?verb=ListRecords) , so you can simply add the baseURL itself. When we extract the URLs for your site, we expect the records in the repository to be formatted using Dublin Core, with the URLs embedded in <dc:identifier> tags.

from https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/other.html#oai

Euro Fedora User Meeting 2005 - Fedora as an OAI-PMH (and WS) Compliant Data Provider

Fedora as an OAI-PMH (and WS) Compliant Data Provider (PowerPoint)
Ana Macario, Alfred Wegener Institute

* very data-centric organization
* involved in DataGrid

* SOA at AWI
[diagram of 2004]

In practice...
post-print -> repository
PI is supposed to release data when published, but by then, it is lost or there are excuses

So need Staging -> Publication

So: Fedora to do all this.

* Reasons for Fedora
- Virtual Repository
- not restricted to Dublin Core
- standards compliant
- etc.

[diagram of 2005]

currently using dc.source and dc.relation as a hack to express linkages,
convinced that proper way to do this is RDF/XML

Long-term issues
* Benchmarking for large number of files
* out-of-box web client acceptance
* fine-grained access control and Shibboleth based AuthN - relevant in DataGRID
* support for sets
* federation model
* collaboration and support
- disseminators for visualizations services; relevant for DataGrid
- Eclipse project to facilitate plugin devel
- Google strategy?
- seminars, tutorials for advanced Fedora users

Euro Fedora User Meeting 2005 - DiPP Digital Peer Publishing

Digital Peer Publishing
DiPP Fedora-based system for Open Access eJournals (PowerPoint)
Jochen Schirrwagen
hbz

http://www.hbz-nrw.de/
http://www.dipp.nrw.de/

Mission
- foundation of new and expansion of existing scientific electronic journals
- customizable workflow within a common publication system [including peer review]
- fast, open and transparent digital peer publishing

Components and Middleware
- Peer Review System (external component)
- from Peer Review System via LDAP auth to Plone-based Publication System
- from Peer Review System via OAI to DiPP Services Fedora-based Repository
- from DiPP to Publishing system via SOAP

currently using Fedora 1.2

challenge: external peer review, Plone-based publishing
want: at least appearance of one unified system

Publication Pipeline: includes Repository Engine, Conversion Engine, Publication Engine
therefore DiPP Services
* Conversion Service
- uses commercial tool to get to DocBook XML, then XSLT to transform to HTML and even PDF
(convert XML to LaTeX using XSLT then to PDF?)
* URN service
- persistent identifier for journals, articles, supplementary material
* Distribution Service
- registration for OAI harvesting
- RSS feeds
- email alerts

also had to build Hierarchy Service because of limitations in Fedora version 1

Fedora - is it good enough?

pros
- highly modularized
- versioning of datastreams
- addition of own metadata formats

cons
- added metadata in own formats not searchable
- inconsistent versioning of API-A (Access) and API-M (Management) from Fedora 1 to Fedora 2

would be good to have a pool of common services

Summary and Outlook
- workflow-based publication system
- extended services on top of Fedora

Next Steps
- DINI certification (German centre for network information)
- full-text indexing via FAST search engine
- improvement of usability

[email protected]

results of first OCLC Research Software Contest

The winner of the OCLC software contest is Dazhi (David) Jiao of Bloomington Indiana for his OPAC.

CAT-OAI integrates OAI harvesting and metadat searching to OPAC search engines and expands users' discoveries in a OPAC search results to related web-accesible digital resources.

from Catalogablog

The runner up was the WAG the Dog web localizer which does nifty things with Google Scholar.

OCLC announcement with various links.

Lorcan Dempsey: Rewarding experiences

Digital Library Federation OAI Portal

DLF OAI Portal
Currently, we are serving  766,513 records from  34 institutions (updated 5 April 2005).

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

CIL2005 presentations are up

www.infotoday.com/cil2005/Presentations/

via dave's blog

Here's one of interest to me:
Harvesting Metadata Using OAI-PMH

CERN 2004 workshop on OAI

Handouts, videos and PowerPoint slides from the CERN Workshop Series on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the benefits of OAI (OAI3) are available.

It took place February 12-14, 2004.

from Catalogablog

Le protocole OAI et ses usages en bibliothèque

L’OAI-PMH a été élaboré par l’Open Archive Initiative (à l’issue de la Convention de Santa Fe, 1999) pour faciliter la description et la diffusion des métadonnées d’articles scientifiques disponibles en accès ouvert sur Internet, notamment dans des répertoires de pré-publications. Il s’est vite révélé très adapté au partage de métadonnées de documents scientifiques ou culturels, présentes dans des ensembles de ressources homogènes ou hétérogènes, plus ou moins réparties. Après une phase d’expérimentation, le protocole a atteint une certaine stabilité   depuis juin 2002, avec sa version 2, considérée comme la spécification définitive.

Ce protocole permet :

• d’abattre des barrières du " web invisible "     en rendant possible le signalement de ressources non accessibles aux moteurs     de recherche ;
• de faciliter l’interopérabilité des ressources documentaires     culturelles, sans duplication ni déchargement des documents numériques     primaires ;
• de mettre à jour simplement et automatiquement des métadonnées     collectées et des liens, en répercutant les dernières     modifications des réservoirs sources, sans copier à nouveau     l’intégralité des données (la charge n’en étant     que plus légère pour les serveurs) ;
• d’encourager l’utilisation d’un format de description assez générique     pour les besoins transdisciplinaires, même les plus simples, sans interdire     des spécifications adaptées à des besoins plus spécialisés ;
• d'intégrer, de ce fait, des ressources d’origine diverses,     dans des traditions descriptives propres, sans empêcher le maintien     parallèle de ces traditions pour d’autres usages.

from www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dll/OAI-PMH.htm
part of Direction du livre et de la lecture

link from BiblioAcid

IL2004 OA video online

The videos from the Internet Librarian 2004 Open Access sessions are now available in Windows Media and RealVideo formats.  There is also one PowerPoint presentation (about OAIster).

www.infotoday.com/il2004/presentations/default.shtml#OA

I blogged about the session previously.

PS My total hits went over 3000 today.

U Southampton OA IRs workshop underway

Two one-day workshops, one a tutorial on practice, one a symposium on policy, held back-to-back provide a comprehensive overview of Open Access Institutional Repositories (OA IRs) in the UK, ...

Background

2005 is poised to be a breakthrough year for Open Access Institutional Repositories in the UK. JISC is set to announce a major call for projects on Institutional Repositories (JISC 2004). Following the lead of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (HoC 2004) -- which recommended mandating author-institution self-archiving of all UK-funded research output, as did the Congress-endorsed open-access plan now being implemented by the National Institutes of Health in the USA (NIH 2004) as well as by the Wellcome Trust -- the eight UK research councils are now considering how to increase access to UK research output. Open Access Institutional Repositories (OA IRs) are critical in supplementing existing access to peer-reviewed journals.

[UK] Open Access Digital Repositories: Leadership, Direction and Launch
January 25-26, 2005

 

standards transforming Australian digital libraries

Ariadne, Issue 41
How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries
Includes an interesting metadata workflow.

The National Library of Australia (NLA) has been able to achieve new business practices such as digitising its collections and hosting federated search services by exploiting recent standards including the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), handles for persistent identification, and metadata schemas for new types of content. Each instantiation of the OAI-PMH opens up new ways of creating and managing our digital libraries while making them more accessible for learning, teaching and research purposes. Using handles as the basis for managing the persistence of a large, digitised collection has allowed information to be identified and cited in many different ways. Standards have transformed, and continue to transform, the way in which the National Library conducts its core business of making its digital library collections available for all to use.

SFU and UBC partner on open source publishing and harvesting

January 20, 2005

The University of British Columbia's Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Simon Fraser University Library and SFU's Canadian Center for Studies in Publishing (CCSP) have formed a partnership to support the maintenance and ongoing development of the internationally acclaimed open source software developed by PKP.

...

At the heart of the partnership are three major software programs. Open Journal Systems (OJS) provides online management for journal submissions, peer reviewing, editing, and online publishing and indexing. Open Conference Systems (OCS) manages conference registration, programming and paper submission and publication. The PKP Harvester (PKPH) is used to automatically create an online index of materials from a variety of online sites including journals and repositories such as those housed at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which are harvested and reside on an SFU Library server.

from New partnership supports open source publishing software development
via Open Access News

CNI Fall 2004

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) had a Fall Task Force Meeting on December 6-7, 2004.
I think most all the presentations are covered by the Project Briefing List and the Plenary Sessions.

Some presentations/reports of interest to me are

* Going 'On-Web' by Lorcan Dempsey and Chip Nilges of OCLC
* How Faculty Members Work: Exploring Faculty Needs for an Institutional Repository
* An Update from the OAI
* UTOPIA: The University of Texas Portal and Institutional Repository
* The Virtual Data Center

conference link via TechnoBiblio

IL2004 - Wednesday - 10:30 Open Access Forum

Originally posted 2004-11-17.

summary of panel discussion from previous forum at Internet Librarian International 2004 in London

London stream
http://www.streamingmedia.com/internetlibrarian/inetlib1_300.asx

/ now we start the overview from the panel and discussion

Gary Price - ResourceShelf - some guy we’re all supposed to have heard of

some guy introducing...

UPDATED 2004-11-24: Stevan Harnad
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
http://www.unites.uqam.ca/cnc/en/profs/harnad.htm

- the subversive proposal - a decade ago
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Open Access is not freedom of information, access to all info, everywhere.
applies to a very specific target literature

literature: 24,000 peer-reviewed journals across all fields
2.5 million articles per year
authors don’t receive any payment for these articles

Open Access movement wants: free, full text online

want to isolate this set of articles, use OAI, so they can be searched separately from regular Google consumer search

one idea: the Golden Road - stop charging the subscriber institutions - convert to recovering costs from author institution - that is the WRONG WAY

other idea: the Green Road - in the hands of the author, author’s institution, author’s funder
author takes supplementary copy - self-archiving - put into OAI-compliant institutional website

librarians are the heroes of the first phase of the open access movement

they were driven by cost issues

the other group: the heroic authors - who have been posting their articles

other issue: copyright and intellectual property
unrefereed preprint - no issue
but Open Access is post-peer-review -
92% publishers are green
70% of publishers say you can self-archive final version anyway

for publishers who say post-print is ownership:
append to pre-print the corrections

authors are losing research impact by not self-archiving

roadblocks
- who is going to pay
- preservation
- what about copyright

what is the magic:
- the authors want research impact, and to contribute to world knowledge
- but still need publish or perish to push them
- use research impact to motivate authors to self-archive
- also mandate self-publish as part of pub-perish.  research funders could do this.  also employer.

talks about many ways to measure research impact in a more sophisticated way

UK had select committee report - would have mandated open access - didn’t fly?
there was a good green recommendation, but they unfortunately mixed in a bunch of gold stuff

USA situation - NIH put thing up for comment - publishers opposed ?
NIH version is just green
other proposal in US House - passed - waiting in Senate ?

Wellcome Trust has already gone green

issue: location of self-archiving - PubMed Central  - issue is that you’re putting into central med/health archive

should be changed: to either send to PubMed OR just send URL - so that it can expand beyond PubMed

--

and now, the panel

SLA will be doing virtual seminar on OA

Cat - OAIster

OAIster harvests more than just Open Access

Andy Boyer - OCLC - WorldCat

Open WorldCat - take abbreviated WorldCat records and expose it through public web search - available through Google and Yahoo

how can we get more information more available to the users who want it
includes making DSpace records available

currently 2 million records available now
all 57 million records will be made available later this month

Sumir - Yahoo Search

surfacing content

150 million active registered users on Yahoo

Yahoo - Content Acquisition Program
indexing of deep web content

mysearch.yahoo.com
Yahoo OCLC Library Toolbar

Open Access important for
- comprehensiveness
- freshness

OA moves content outside publisher pay-content “firewalls”
OA puts the info on the web faster than publication cycles

Partnered with Public Library of Science.  Gold Road.
Partnered with OAIster.  Green Road.

other Andy - Public Library of Science (PLOS)
talk about “hopeless, wrong Gold Road”

PLOS - Stanford Biologists - looking at 6000 genes - best way would be to gather all papers on these topics to analyze all info in one place -

they couldn’t get the content they wanted
this made them angry

mission: make the scientific and medical literature a free public resource

two criteria for OA according to PLOS
1. governed by copyright license to freely access, use, transmit
2. article must be deposited immediately in at least one public archive

how can you do this?
publishers need to act as service providers
treat costs of publication as part of research costs
comes to cost of about 1% of grant in biomedical case

Gary Price - ResourceShelf - DocuTracker
findability

Yahoo is good

public web vs invisible web
general search vs specialized search

for specific title searching, results are good
WorldCat is coming up higher in Yahoo than in Google
but in subject searching, results rank much lower

Open Source toolbar  for FireFox - NeedleSearch

OPAC people need to get into business of making custom toolbars

e.g. “my local library’s search toolbar”

are libraries prepared for more interlibrary loan as Open WorldCat becomes popular

people use short queries with basic terms
there are also SEO people trying to hack the results
also most people only look at first set of results
people don’t use advanced searches

OAIster only searches metadata
Steven says boolean full-text search will beat anything.

PLOS - mirror sites etc.
PLOS - would like to integrate PubMed and OAIster

OAIster doesn’t do OpenURL yet
OAIster can do it, with a hack

Q as a librarian, would like to use a single interface to locate info, and go to a single place to locate OA info

Z39.50 SRW? coming for OAIster

Steven - don’t mix general search with open access
problem with OA is not SEARCH it is lack of content

Q Law Librarian AALL
Are the barriers to increasing open access the same for every discipline, or different between law and science.

Q big universities have resources to create repositories

Steven (with VOICE OF GOD) says it is cheap: $1000 server, two days of sys admin.

guy from New England College of Optometry []
guy has been looking at tech aspects - there are challenges -
primary issues are workflow etc. - someone has to put it in the repository

Steven says everything is trivial.

SUNY Courtland? woman
her authors say why put it in OA if the collegues etc. all use pay services
it has to be made very easy to find

the research info guy
ResearchIndex / CiteSeer
new one smealsearch.psu.edu - for business material

everyone is going all DSpace

CalPoly guy
Q how does this impact the social aspect of science

Scientists want to be associated with major journal(s).
Also, what about major societies e.g. IEEE.

Q funding models
PLOS - author pay - part of research cost
Steven - Gold model is premature

however cost per article $500 - $1500 - $2000 - $3000 (Springer Open Choice)

cost for open access green is much cheaper, Steven says under $10

Q fulltext vs metadata

general search engines just use full text

Google only indexes as far as 100KB

Yahoo uses trusted metadata from CAP program.