Roy Tennant

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Digital Library Collections Services

• Roy Tennant
• California Digital Library

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Outline

• What Libraries Do
• A Few Good Things
• Access Principles
• Integration Principles
• Final Advice

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What Libraries Do

• Select
• Acquire
• Organize
• Provide Access To
• Publish
• Preserve

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Select

• Analog Selection
• Content (books, journals, videos, etc.)
• Finding Tools (article indexes, etc.)
• Digital Selection (all of the above, plus)
• Analog items to digitize
• Content repositories to harvest
• Web sites to crawl
• Resources to search
• Do not ignore free content free does not mean
  bad

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Acquire

• Analog Acquisition
• Bringing physical objects into a building
  (marking and parking)
  
• Digital Acquisition
• Licensing or Buying
• Linking (Virtual marking and parking)
• Ingesting
• Harvesting Metadata
• Crawling Web Sites

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Licensing or Buying

• Licensing more common than buying (but what do
  you have in the end?)
  
• Libraries are increasingly demanding ownership,
  and/or content held in escrow
  
• The time to advocate change is before you sign
  - Beverlee French, CDL
  

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Ingesting

• Absorbing the actual content and metadata into
  local systems
  
• Example scenarios
• Batch loading
• Content creator uploading
• Example sites
• Institutional Repositories eScholarship
  Repository, DSpace
  
• Union Catalog Online Archive of California

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Harvesting Metadata

• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata
  Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
  
• A simple protocol for exposing metadata for
  others to download (harvest)
  
• Data providers are those with the data, service
  providers are those who harvest metadata and
  provide search services
  
• Data providers can segment their metadata into
  sets or not
  
• Only required metadata format is Dublin Core, but
  any other format can also be used

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Crawling Websites

• The process of recursively capturing content from
  web sites either all or part
  
• Current state of the software
• Many applications available, but vary quite a bit
  in effectiveness and options
  
• Few abilities yet to allow a librarian to review
  a web site summary and control the crawl by
  selecting paths to follow or content types to
  ignore or capture
• Capturing only the first step systems for
  exposing crawls still primitive

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Organize

• Analog organization
• Mostly assigning call numbers and putting on the
  shelf
  
• Digital organization
• Must deal with a heterogeneous environment
• A wide variety of new tasks, such as
• Metadata analysis, normalization, and enrichment
• Building interoperable systems
• Creating ways that content can be segmented for
  various user purposes
  
• Many of the tools and techniques for digital
  organization are being made up as we go along!

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Metadata Analysis

• Analyzing metadata for attributes such as
• Fields available
• Percentages of empty fields
• Granularity
• Encoding variances
• Ability to be integrated with existing metadata
• State of the software
• Mostly non-existent
• Some specific utilities can be easily developed

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Metadata Normalization

• Required because encoding practices can vary
  widely
  
• Normalization attempts to translate variances
  into a common encoding, to enhance searching and
  browsing
  
• Depending on the normalization task, software may
  achieve greater or lesser results
  
• Human intervention may be the only way to achieve
  a 100 solution, but 80 may be sufficient

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Metadata Enrichment

• When aggregating metadata from others, enrichment
  for your particular purposes may be required,
  e.g.
  
• Added subject headings
• Date ranges for browsing and search limits
• Tools are just beginning to be developed to
  enrich metadata through software transformations
  
• Useful model keep a copy of original (untouched)
  record, create a new, enhanced record, both
  within a single METS record

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Provide Access To

• System Services
• 24/7 network access
• Tailored views (including slicing and
  skinning)
  
• Methods for user control e.g., sorting, ranking,
  etc.
  
• Personal workspace e.g., citation saving, etc.
• Citation downloading, emailing, etc.
• Human Services
• Interlibrary Loan
• Reference

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Librarians View
These 4 slides from Berkley Laite, Shippensburg
University

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Librarians View
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Librarians View
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Librarians View
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Publish

• Libraries are increasingly getting involved with
  publishing
  
• Institutional repositories
• Partnerships with professional societies or
  university presses
  
• Most successful projects tend to be partnerships
  between libraries (providing technical
  infrastructure) and existing publishers
  (providing editorial and promotion services)
• Main purpose to capture scholarship at the point
  of production and make freely available

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Preserve

• Methods and practices for digital preservation
  still being worked out
  
• Various strategies for the preservation of bits
• Distributed storage of copies
• Centralized, trusted repositories
• Migration issue still an open question
• Emulation
• Translation
• Hot issue at the moment, with much grant money to
  be found to help create solutions

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A Few Good Things

• Needs Assessment Usability Testing
• Standards Protocols
• Best Practices Guidelines
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined
• Prototypes
• Rapid Development

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Needs Assessment Usability Testing

• Needs Assessment
• Talking to your users
• Should be starting point for any library service
• Usability Testing
• Testing a particular service/interface with the
  target audience
  
• Good information can be discovered with easy,
  simple procedures
  
• Test early and often

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Standards Protocols

• Standard conforming to or constituting a
  standard of measurement or value - WordNet
  
• Standards are ubiquitous and often competing
  The wonderful thing about standards is that
  there are so many to choose from - NISO
  
• Protocol A standard procedure for regulating
  data transmission between computers. -
  Answers.com

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Foundational Standards

• Hardware, system software, network protocols,
  etc.
  
• Key Internet standards and protocols HTTP, HTML,
  etc.
  
• XML
• Web Services (i.e., SOAP, REST, etc.)

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Important New Library Standards

• OAI-PMH
• RSS
• SRW/U (and MXG)

• MODS
• ONIX
• METS
• Dublin Core

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XML everywhere!
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Best Practices Guidelines

• Complement standards with practical advice and
  guidance for implementation
  
• May consist of recommended procedures, profiles
  (defined subsets), etc. that apply to a specific
  standard or set of standards
  
• Can be as important as the standards themselves
  to those seeking to comply
  

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Small Pieces Loosely Joined

• Small pieces
• Discrete components that perform a specific task
• Built incrementally
• Loosely joined
• Connected via standard protocols (e.g., Web
  Services)
  
• Independent but interoperable
• Could (often are) be provided by separate
  organizations

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Prototypes

• Simple or smoke and mirrors systems to
  demonstrate possibilities
  
• Examples
• Linked HTML pages that mimic systems
  functionality, but dont actually work
  
• Primitive systems that demonstrate functionality,
  but arent pretty
  
• Can be easier for others to comprehend than
  textual descriptions

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Rapid Development

• When writing code, release early
• To obtain early feedback
• To allow early course corrections
• And often
• To fix bugs
• To add new functions incrementally
• To respond to perceived user needs and feedback

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Access Principles

• Only librarians like to search, everyone else
  likes to find
  
• Good enough is just that
• People arent lazy, theyre human
• All things being equal, one place to search is
  better than more
  
• Services should be placed as close to the user as
  possible

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Integration Principles

• Centralize content whenever possible
• If you cant centralize content, centralize
  metadata
  
• If you cant centralize metadata, centralize
  searching
  
• Exploit metadata similarities
• Honor metadata differences
• Offer appropriate methods to narrow the scope

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Final Words of Advice

• Be acquainted with all relevant library standards
  (enough to know what each one is good for)
  
• Know more deeply those with which you must
  interact on a regular basis
  
• Be prepared to help establish and review new
  standards
  
• Be clear about internal vs. external standards
  compliance, and when each is indicated
  
• Keep learning!