1 / 35

Threats or Opportunities?

Threats or Opportunities?. Resources in the New Information Landscape. William E. Moen <wemoen@unt.edu> Texas Center for Digital Knowledge School of Library and Information Sciences University of North Texas. Two areas of professional responsibility. Connect users to information

truly
Download Presentation

Threats or Opportunities?

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Threats or Opportunities? Resources in the New Information Landscape William E. Moen <wemoen@unt.edu> Texas Center for Digital Knowledge School of Library and Information Sciences University of North Texas

  2. Two areas of professional responsibility • Connect users to information • Instruct users to use tools and resources • Both of these require awareness and knowledge of: • Available resources • Information organization practices • Tools to access those resources • Standards and technologies used by the tools • How the tools work Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  3. What/how to expose? How to find? Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  4. Evolving information landscape • Order of the book is over • Fewer formal structures that serve as gatekeepers, filters, etc. for what’s available • Does not mean authoritative and credible information is not available • Maybe it’s in different places • Maybe it looks a bit different • Our users are finding it – so what is our role? Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  5. The library’s diminishing market share • Think in terms of value-added services • What value do we add that save potential users time, money, effort, etc? • We have valuable resources but are users using them? • Library catalog is being bypassed • Large allocation of budget for commercially provided resource (licensed databases, etc.) • We make users use our systems that are not easy to use • Think of the various interfaces of the licensed databases • Are we driving them away? Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  6. Exposing/Finding Option 1 Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  7. What happens if Google … • Acquires or licenses for global access key commercial information resources • Indexes the resources • Provides single, easy to use search interface to all those resources • Charges $10/month for users to have access to all of that • Who will use our hard-to-use resources with all those different interfaces? Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  8. The Networked Information Landscape According to Google Digitized Books Open Web Google Licensed Databases WorldCat Digital Repositories Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  9. Exposing/Finding Option 2 Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  10. New resources and tools • Repository applications • Metadata harvesting and building collections • Metasearch to reduce access barriers Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  11. What are repositories? Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  12. Repository types • Digital repository (sort of a generic term) • Image repository • (e.g., http://pro.corbis.com/) • Learning objects repository • (e.g., http://careo.ucalgary.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CAREO.woa?theme=careo) • Data repository • (e.g.,http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/DHub/bioinformatics.html) • Institutional repository • (e.g., http://txspace.tamu.edu/) • Differentiated by • Types of objects • Types of metadata • Purpose • … Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  13. Repositories – The technical side • Database component • Metadata component • Search and browsing component • Web interface component • Submission component • Administration component • … Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  14. Institutional repositories • A repository application: • Preserve and provide access to the intellectual output of an institution Crow, Raym. The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper. 2002 • A set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members Lynch Clifford A. Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age. 2003 • Characterized by: • Organizational commitment to long-term stewardship • Open access Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  15. Characteristics of IRs • Institutionally defined rather than subject-based repository • Web-based system for storage of and access to scholarly material • Long-term stewardship of intellectual assets • Support the process of scholarly communication • Open and interoperable Mark Ware Consulting Ltd.Pathfinder Research on Web-based Repositories: Final Report.2004 Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  16. Potential contents for IRs • Pre-prints and post-prints • Technical reports, working papers • Theses & dissertations • Books or chapters of books • Conference proceedings • Presentations • Sound and video files • Digital research materials( e.g. simulations, code) • … Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  17. Cornell Repository Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  18. Texas A&M Repository Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  19. Texas A&M Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  20. Texas A&M Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  21. Metadata – The key • Boundaries between information communities are porous • The world will not be made up of MARC • Many metadata schemes: • To describe and manage resources • Provide structured representations of the resources that can be processed by machines • Serving needs of different information communities • Typically using Extended Markup Language (XML) • Syntax for encoding metadata for exchange and reuse “I've often said librarians should like any metadata they see.” (R. Tennant) Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  22. Dempsey’s acronymic density or …this is the present future!! • Metadata schemes: • DC, MODS, CDWA, VRA, etc. • Metadata content standards • AACR, CCO, DACS, etc. • Metadata encoding standards: • MARC, XML, RDF, etc. • Metadata container/wrapper standards: • METS, MPEG, etc. • Discipline specific metadata schemes: • GILS, CSDGMI, GEM, IEEE-LOM, etc. • Other schemes of interest: • TEI, EAD, etc. Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  23. Extending the visibility – OAI-PMH • Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html • Defines a protocol for harvesting metadata from repositories • Partitions the world into: • Data providers • Service providers • Uses Dublin Core Metadata Element Set as standard metadata representation for exchange • Uses XML for exchanging the metadata records Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  24. OAI architecture Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  25. Harvesting metadata From: http://www.oaforum.org/tutorial/ Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  26. OAIster • A union catalog of digital resources • Contains nearly 11,000,000 records describing freely-available and restricted-access digital resources • Uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting • Harvests the descriptive metadata (records) and makes those searchable • Currently harvesting from over 700 digital repositories Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  27. OAIster results: library reference services Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  28. Metasearch (or federated search) • Single search interface • Concurrent searching of two or more resources • Uses various technologies • Standards such as Z39.50 information retrieval protocol; Search and Retrieve Web Service • Proprietary Connectors (e.g., WebFeat, Muse Global) • Screen scraping (not a good idea!) • Helps users get started discovering resources Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  29. Exposing/Finding Option 3 Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  30. Exposing/Finding Option 4 Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  31. Exposing/Finding Option 5 Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  32. Index Data Master Key (prototype) • Enables efficient metasearching of hundreds of databases at the same time • Uses Z39.50, SRU/W, or proprietary protocols • Open-source-based alternative to proprietary, closed-source metasearch alternatives. • Supports: • on-the-fly merging • relevance-ranking • sorting by arbitrary data elements • facets for limiting result sets by subject, author, etc. • Current demo searches open web resources • OAIster • Open Directory • Wikipedia • Open Content Alliance • Can be used for metasearching of catalogs, commercial dbs, etc. Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  33. MasterKey Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  34. Challenges and opportunities • A good reference librarian: • Assesses resources • Knows how to access the resources • Understands how the resources are organized • Helps users understand information needs • Helps users learn to assess and access • And now needs to: • Understand new technologies underlying important new resources • Understand new organizational schemes (i.e., metadata beyond MARC) • Provide new value-added services to use new resources • Help build new virtual collections to serve users Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

  35. References • Institutional Repositories. Roy Tennant. 2002 http://libraryjournal.reviewsnews.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA242297&publication=libraryjournal • Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age. Clifford A. Lynch. 2003 http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html • OAI-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html • OAI for Beginners - the Open Archives Forum online tutorial http://www.oaforum.org/tutorial/ • OAIster.org • http://www.oaister.org/ • Index Data Master Key • http://mkey.indexdata.com/demo/ • Z39.50 and Search and Retrieve Web Service (SRU/SRW) • http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ • http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ For a copy of this presentation, go to: http://www.unt.edu/wmoen Reference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 2007

More Related