The formal press release regarding JISC project - TOCRoSS was published today.

The 10 month joint project between Emerald Group Publishing Ltd,The University of Derby, and Talis will deliver standards, open source software and a test bed example installation at Derby.

The project team will be proposing an open standards extension to the RSS 2.0 standard to encode metadata associated with e-journal publishing events, for example publication of a journal, issue or article.

To drive TOCRoSS, an RSS server located at the publisher site will generate a ‘feed’ of information that can be automatically picked up by an RSS monitor located at the customer site. The project will also develop a plug-in module for the library management system to enable the catalogue and the OPAC to be updated with the information from the RSS stream.

With TOCRoSS in place, e-journal table of content data will be fed automatically into library catalogues without the need for cataloguing, classification or data entry. This will improve the accuracy of records, save time for library staff and deliver a more integrated OPAC experience to
library users. It will be of particular value to academic libraries, where students often choose search engines such as Google over the library catalogue or myriad databases for tracking down articles and information.

Full article [pdf]

Yet another use of RSS, this time for consumption by both humans & systems.

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Dick Hardt, CEO of sxip Identity and subject of our very first podcast, draws my attention to the new Structured Blogging initiative.

“Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable. You can enter information in this form and it’ll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.

Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data - events, reviews, classified ads - can be represented in your blog.”

I shall definitely be taking a closer look, as it sounds potentially powerful… …and it works with Movable Type, the technology behind this blog.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Identity 2.0, Library 2.0, Podcasting, Structured Blogging, sxip, Syndication, Web 2.0

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Amongst a set of eleven topics with reasonably current draft posts (some of which I think I’ll have to give up on and just delete…) sitting in ecto, this recent press release from CrossRef is worth bubbling to the top of the pile, as it can be dealt with briefly.

“CrossRef Web Services will create an easy-to-use tool for authorized search and web services partners to gather metadata to streamline web crawling. The CrossRef metadata database contains records for the more than 18 million items from over 1,500 publishers, the majority of whom are expected to choose to participate in this optional new service. The CrossRef Search Partner program provides standard terms of use for search engines, libraries, and other partners to use the metadata available from CrossRef Web Services – terms that promote copyright compliance and the important role published works of record play in scholarly communication.

CrossRef Web Services also provides search partners with a map to published scholarly content on the Web. In this way, it functions as a notification, or ‘ping’, mechanism for the publication of new content. Alerting crawlers to new or revised content to be indexed greatly reduces the need for ongoing re-crawling of publisher sites. ‘Search engines want better ways to gather standard, cross-publisher metadata to enhance their search indexes. Publishers want to streamline the way they provide metadata to a growing number of partners. CrossRef Web Services and the Search Partner Program fill this void,’ said Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef. ‘With CrossRef repurposing parts of its metadata database and using common protocols like standardized XML and OpenURL (and SOAP, RSS and other protocols in future), these services can significantly enhance indexes.’”

Outside the internal systems of big publishers like Wiley, where Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) play a largely invisible role in tying the whole thing together, the DOI hasn’t really gained the traction that I initially believed it would. This seems a shame, and is presumably largely due to the financial models currently deployed in supporting the central organisation and associated services such as CrossRef.

The relative complexity or effort involved in deploying DOIs within a system such as an ILS and then making them actionable must also play a significant role here, though. As such, this statement of intent must surely be welcomed as a useful step towards making the value of the DOI more easily realised in a variety of contexts and through a range of interfaces.

I’m still not sure about the business model, though…

The release was originally brought to my attention by Peter Scott, and is highly relevant, given some of the possibilities to be explored at our next Research Day, being organised with BIC.

Technorati Tags: Library 2.0, Standards

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William Heath in his EU member states v Google: no contest posting on Ideal government europe is demanding his taxes back from the European-jingoistic response to Google’s audacity in wanting to search the whole planet including Europe’s Library collections. [I paraphrase].

His complaint being that the European Governments have piled in loads of money to try, and not succeed, to beat Google at their own game.

Mind you quotes like this from Jacques Chirac the French President instils one with a certain amount of trepidation:

“We’re engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy“…..”In France, in Europe, it’s our power that’s at stake“

So taking a look at The European Library you find a traditional OPAC-looking web site which performs a broadcast search across an EU online catalogue, and the catalogues hosted in the member countries. It’s interesting [the first time you do a search] to watch the result counts (and the odd error) totting up from each member country. Thereafter you start wondering why the results are not just there, as they would be in Google.

Once you scratch the surface, it becomes very clear that it is the result of stitching together many dissimilar systems. For instance the display of character sets - search for ‘harry potter’ and the first result from the British Library displays thus “Harri Potter i v’i?a?zen’ Azkabanu / Dz?h?. K. Roling ; z anhliis’koï pereklav Viktor Morozov ; za redakt?s?ii?e?i?u? Ivana Malkovycha.” I’m sure in a European project, with more participating countries and therefore languages than you can shake a stick at, they could have got the correct display of Unicode/UTF8 sorted from the start. The site comes with a Beta Version Warning so that perfection cannot be expected, maybe we have just got used to the quality of other perpetual beta offerings.

So is William’s plea for his money back a valid one? Unfortunately not. Google Print, which he is comparing it with, searches the contents of books that have been digitized. Whereas The European Library, like traditional library search engines uses the bibliographic metadata that has been catalogued about the books. So they are doing very different jobs. Mind you if you could combine both capabilities, that would be powerful.

That is not to say that his points about user experience are not valid, they are. This comparison does raise some fundamental issues though.

Why do Google services always go like a rocket? - Because they harvest the content in to their own servers. Why don’t projects like The European Library do that? - Because its too difficult (harvesting, hosting, supporting the load, copyright reasons, ownership reasons, competing thiefdom reasons, imprecise protocols and data formats, project funding uncertainty, etc., etc.) well at least it always has been too difficult to do it any other way.

Looking at the site it seems apparent that its underlying architecture is a traditional Web 1.0 application with a smattering of things like XSLT to add functionality in to the user interface. So is there a better way in the emerging world of Web 2.0?

Taking it to the extreme, why not let the users browser search all these catalogues directly. Routing it all through some servers in The Netherlands is bound to slow things up. Some of the AJAX work I have been doing for the Talis Research days, shows that is very possible.

There again with intelligent harvesting where possible, plus intelligent caching where not, aggregated search performance that approached Google speed may be possible. And anyway does the user really care which country’s library holds an item. They firstly need to find out if what they are searching for exists, and then how to get access to it. [But that is a whole other story!]

Those who have been following Panlibus and other Talis Blogs such as Silkworm will know that we have been deep in to projects addressing the way that open participative architectures utilising techniques loosely labelled as Web 2.0, can open up closed collections such as Library catalogues [from the local to the national] liberating them to become part of a distributed information environment. As the Talis Insight Conference approaches, you should be hearing more on this.

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The Shifted Librarian writes, from a somewhat frustrated point of view, on using the XML enabled backend to her Innovative catalogue to “just build what I want“

I?m sometimes told that III has an XML backend so I should just be able to build what I want on my own. Of course, my first response (of many) is that I?m not a programmer so I can?t just build what I want, but Casey Bisson at Plymouth State University is, and he?s trying to build weird and wonderful things with his own Innovative catalog.

She quotes Casey:

…their XML schema is non-standard, is even more difficult to work with than MARC, and is prone to parsing errors. So here we have an ILS vendor that claims to have an XML backend you can do whatever you want with, except that it?s incredibly difficult to do whatever you want with it, especially if you want to do something nutty like integrate your catalog?s content into your university?s way cool portal…

So, if her interpretation is correct, here is a classic example of “encoding your data using a standard, such as XML, does not necessarily make it ‘standard‘ data“

Exposing the catalogue encoded in XML is a powerful first step to enabling integration, but if the schema for that data is non-standard and difficult for people unfamiliar with the inner workings of the catalogue to work with, it is about as much use as a chocolate tea pot.

The wide distribution of library functionality into non-library system interfaces is becoming an unstoppable trend. Which in its self gives rise to many none technical issues I discuss here. The implementers of these interfaces will in general have zero understanding of the inner workings of a library catalogue [why should they], and most likely will not have the time or inclination to get their head around library domain search protocols such as SRU, SRW, Z39.50, OpenURL, etc.

I suspect that in the none to distant future one of the most oft repeated statements in integration discussions will be “Give me the url for your OpenSearch Description Document and I’ll have it integrated in a jiffy!“.

Why OpenSearch? Well it [clearly has the potential to become] a de facto simple search standard, and most importantly it is simple. Simple to understand, and simple to implement. I challenge anyone, who can read XML, to be able to construct an OpenSearch search against our Talis Prism OPAC demonstrator in the address bar of their favorite browser within a few minutes of looking at the url element of our OpenSearch Description Document. OK the results come back as RSS ‘items’, but any implementer worth their salt will soon have those appearing in your portal.

Thats what I mean by standard XML, even though OpenSearch has not, as yet, ventured anywhere near a standards organization.

If Library Systems get the reputation for being difficult to integrate with, the portal implementers will end up bypassing them. It is up to the industry both individually and in groups such as VIEWS to do something about it. We at Talis intend to play our part in this.

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I’ve been re-reading Theo van Veen’s D-Lib article Renewing the Information Infrastructure of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek about the proposals for the major renewal of the information infrastructure in the National Library of the Netherlands, which was recommended for reading by Lorcan Dempsey.

I agree with Lorcan, it is well worth looking at. Firstly from a position of envy. Theo hints that they will be building on their current infrastructure, but the recommendations do have the flavor of ‘clean sheet starting point’ about them. I’m always envious of those that can start from a clean sheet.

Mainly though, it is the clarity of thought that is interesting - Using XML throughout - Using standard protocols (SRU) to search and retrieve everything - Separating the the data returned as a result, from the processing required to use it - Routing requests via an organisational resolver - Using [and then building upon] Dublin Core as a minimum to allow generic search access - Using only XSLT for creating “data driven” interfaces - Using the power of the browser to render added value interfaces (Ajax is worth a look in this regard) - etc.

There is one assertion that recent experience makes me question:

In the recommendations URL-based requests have been assumed, but the proposed concept is also applicable in web services based on SOAP [17]. The implementation barrier for URL-based services is, however, assumed to be lower than for web services based on SOAP.

I shared that assumption until working on some WSDL described SOAP services in both Java and .NET. Sitting back and watching the development environments automatically building all the utility classes I needed to create and interpret the XML payloads of the SOAP messages was a joy to behold! So, no you can’t easily type a URL in to your browser to test a SOAP call like you can with a URL-based service, but when you get around to building an application on top of the service, WSDL & SOAP pay back handsomely.

Wanting the best of all worlds, my recommendation is that wherever possible all Web Services should be made available via URL and SOAP. The former for simple testing and integration, the latter to underpin serious application integration.

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This is the subject line of a thread that’s been running on the XML4LIB email list over the last couple of days. The question has been around almost as long as XML itself, but MARC is still very much with us.

Several writers in the thread argue that the question is wrong: XML cannot replace MARC because they are different things. For me, though, that confuses three different components in the MARC world: the MARC standard (ISO 2709), the different flavours such as MARC 21, which are like application profiles defining content designators and lists of values, and content standards, predominantly Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). ISO 2709 is a kind of extensible markup language designed for data exchange and so could be replaced by XML, but it can only be done effectively when the other two components are re-aligned to modern requirements and to the flexible power of XML.

Not surprisingly, the Library of Congress’ MARCXML framework is discussed in the thread. In a strict sense, it replaces MARC, i.e. ISO 2709, with XML. But it deliberately emulates precisely the restrictive structural characteristics of MARC, enabling round trip no loss conversion, to allow MARC data to be manipulated and transformed to other formats and contexts, using modern XML tools. Undoubtedly, this has been a tonic for the geriatric MARC, or (switching metaphors) it is a useful bridge or stopgap between the the old world of MARC and a new world, as yet not fully realised, based on XML. It allows a little more value to be squeezed from the huge investment of systems and data in MARC.

Some writers in the thread, however, criticise MARCXML for not being the panacea that it makes no claim to be. Its structure means that it is not well suited to XML indexing systems so performance is sub-optimal and, more importantly, it is not capable of articulating metadata in ways that are now required. Several writers call not only for better articulation of the metadata but also for a different set of metadata elements, more suited to modern requirements for search, navigation, data presentation and interchange between heterogeneous environments. Peter Binkley (University of Alberta) puts it well:

… we need metadata to aid not just searching but also clustering, linking to relevant external resources, etc. - all the things we can do in the new environment to enhance search results and other forms of access. The XML tools for using web services etc. are great and will get better much faster than anything MARC-based.

Here, though, we move into the territory of application profiles and content rules. As several other writers in the thread point out, an area of activity that could be leading the way to a full replacement of MARC is that based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). In the publishing world, it provided the conceptual model for the bibliographic elements of the Indecs framework, which led to the development of the ONIX format. Now, its principles are being built into the next edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, AACR3. Although AACR3 will be capable of expression in MARC 21, it will push MARC’s capabilities closer to the limits. MARC records have been ‘FRBRised’ in a number of different initiatives with some success, but the work has clearly discovered shortcomings in the MARC format.

MARC will not be replaced by a single, dominant and self-contained metadata format. We can no longer even scope the contents of a ’self-contained’ record. Increasingly, we require and have the ability to connect pieces of content dynamically and unrestrictedly, as we move towards the semantic web. The ‘replacement’ will be a metadata infrastructure. This is well argued by Roy Tennant in his article A bibliographic metadata infrastructure for the 21st century, summed up in his catchphrase ‘I never metadata I didn’t like’.

Dick Miller and his colleagues at the Lane Medical Library, Stanford University Medical Center, have done a great deal of impressive work to show the way forward for bibliographic data, in their development of XOBIS. A quote from his post to the thread makes a fitting end:

Some may think that MARC is robust since so many ILS systems use it, but ILS systems themselves are endangered, not able to respond with agility to changing technologies. For libraries to flourish, bibliographic data needs to be flexibly deployable in broader environments lest we will gradually lose relevance.

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Sharing photos, via websites, amongst family and friends is nothing unusual and now some websites are offering to market your photos to publishers and other markets enabling you to make money. Metadata produce the value-add and transform a picture of your holiday that you might otherwise only share with family and friends into product that a publisher will buy. fotoLibra is a good example of such a site and has been getting some attention in the business press and was featured in February’s Real Business magazine’s “50 to watch 2005”. fotoLibra, With their business model in mind, devote a lot of effort on advice on how to create metadata even (in the their forum) going into some detail about Dublin Core.

“Established [picture] libraries are now busy cataloguing and digitising their huge collections, and searching can be a nightmare. That’s where fotoLibra has a great advantage. The people cataloguing its images are the ones who know them best—the photographers and picture owners themselves. That means picture buyers can find exactly what they’re looking for, quickly and reliably.“

So here is value from Metadata being created at source. There is however an interesting forum debate about the resulting problems of “keywording”. People often overdo the metadata and “throw the dictionary or thesaurus at it” I also found it interesting that they are using DOIs.

Flickr from Ludicorp research is another photo sharing site that is getting a lot of attention and was featured in the Guardian recently. It is interesting that you can choose to license the photos you upload to Flickr under a Creative Commons license. They too place a lot of emphasis on metadata or “tags” Both these sites, because they are about sharing are good examples of Folksonomy in action. I noticed Ludicorp’s president Stewart Butterfield is sharing a platform to speak on “Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess” at next month’s emerging technology conference in San Diego.

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Another interesting piece of work on metadata is just starting. It’s a study by William Moen (the Z39.50 specialist at the University of North Texas) called ‘MARC Content Designation Utilization: Inquiry & Analysis. Examining Present Practices to Inform Future Metadata Use: An Empirical Analysis of MARC Content Designation Utilization’. In this 2-year project, the researchers will will investigate the extent of catalogers’ use of MARC 21, the mark-up language used by catalogers worldwide to create electronic catalog records. OCLC will provide a sample of 1 million MARC bibliographic records for this project.
The current MARC 21 specifications define nearly 2000 fields and subfields available to library catalogers working to create catalog records for a wide variety of materials. In the Z-Interoperability Testbed Project, Moen discovered strong indications that only 36 of the available MARC subfields accounted for 80% of all subfield utilization. These preliminary findings have important implications for library catalogers, standards developers, and people involved in the machine generation of metadata.

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Just received an email about a new site, www.describethis.com, described as
a service designed for the automatic extraction of metadata from online resources. You can indicate the resource to analyze and how to download the results as XML, XHTML or RDF files.
In the current version (1.0 BETA), the site’s engine is able to find the resources to process using keywords, full URLs or more complex queries with operators, like “ISBN”, used to collect the bibliographic data for published documents. So it can work as a metasearch engine using other search engines to locate the best sites where the resource can be found. The results returned back contain the automatically generated Dublin Core elements for the requested resource and can be downloaded as RDF, XML or XHTML.
Well worth a look and a play for anyone iterested in metadata.

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