Librarians And The Web

Librarians And The Web Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.

The Role Of Librarians • The Library Community: • Is driving the Web due to its long-standing involvement with information management • Is another user department (like medicine and law) which needs to follow the Web management community • If the latter, it affects the development of your institutional and departmental Web services • The Library is good at: • Searching • Cataloguing (metadata) • Involvement with Users • But can emphasise the client side of Web too much

He wasn’t a librarian so he forgot about the missing component - metadata Metadata Background To The Web • The Web: • Invented by an English computer scientist working in Europe • Tim Berners-Lee developed the 3 key architectural components: • Data format (HTML) • Transport (HTTP) • Addressing (URIs/URLs) HTML HTTP URIs

Dangers • Possible dangers: • Library community thinks its driving developments, but misses the new stuff • Thinks Web has stabilised and misses the new stuff • Becomes over-reliant on an application (“here’s how I developed my Intranet using Notscape content management system”) • Library takes a departmental view when an organisational strategy is needed

The New Stuff • New stuff to think about: • HTML is dead (see article at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/web-focus/) • XML is the answer • You’ll then get XSLT, modularity, richer hyperlinking through XLink and XPointer, … • Sounds scary but … • XHTML gives you an easy route to XML • You will know about problems with URLs: “the book is third from the left on the fourth row on Level 4 of the Aberdeen Polytechnic Library.”“Aberdeen Polytechnic no longer exists? Sorry that’s life in the Library world ” So you’ll need to know about DOIs, OpenURLs, …

Kill Off The HTML Authoring Tool • HTML authoring tools should be killed off: • They give a file-oriented view of things • They may make it difficult to: • Make use of fragments • Manage collections of Resources • Deploy new services (e.g. personalisation) on new devices (e-book, WAP, etc.) • Think about: • CSS (you should know this) • Server-side includes (standard programming concept of reuse through subroutines) • Server-side scripting

Demise Of Joe Homepage? • Web is great: • Easy concepts, easy to use, easy to create • But: • Professional, fully-functional services will be complex • If you continue with the FrontPage approach you’ll make problems for yourself next year • You’ll probably need to know about RDF, DOIs, URNs, WML, XSLT, CC/PP, XML Schemas and Namespaces, SOAP, UDDI and other TLAs and XTLAs • You’ll want to provide personalised, accessible pages (“I’m blue-green colour blind and suffer from shakes”, …)

Sounds Scary • Maybe but: • Perhaps this stuff can be handled by a Content Management System? • Issues: • Cost and resource implications (Vignette) • Open source vs licensed software • Application dependencies (cf Lotus Notes URLs) • What happens if you don’t do it: • Commercial sector does public information • Dotcom companies compete with academic libraries • The end of the road for libraries? – see <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/pub-libs/>

Conclusions • To conclude: • Library community do have a valuable role to play • Library developments should be based on sound (backend) architectural principles • Avoid vendor lock-in • Keep up-to-date with developmentsNOTE – see “A Librarian’s Primer to XML and Other MLs” workshop on Thursday 09:00-16:30

Librarians And The Web