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Managing Electronic Resources

This chapter will explore the increasing role of managing digital resources within the library. The increasing access to digital resources entails growing complexity in the resources management by the library, including digital libraries/collections, digital news feeds, digitisation of Parliamentary resources. This additional complexity can lead to requirements for a Federated search capability (integrating into a single portal the major information resources) and workflow management systems (to management the complex processes in electronic collection development) and single sign-on(to hide the complexity of access to multiple underlying database resources). Electronic resource management is becoming an increasingly important role for libraries. The types of documents include:

  • born digital documents, including digital news feeds
  • documents for which the library has a responsibility to digitise and preserve
  • electronic subscriptions

For Parliamentary libraries, electronic resources typically encompass three areas:

  1. News items and Press releases
  2. Electronic Journals and Electronic books
  3. Electronic databases, including consortia databases
  4. Digital libraries to manage assets of the Parliament itself

The increasing access to digital resources entails growing complexity in the resources management by the library, including digital libraries/collections, digital news feeds, digitisation of Parliamentary resources. This additional complexity can lead to requirements for a Federated search capability (integrating into a single portal the major information resources) and workflow management systems (to management the complex processes in electronic collection development) and single sign-on(to hide the complexity of access to multiple underlying database resources)..

The rapidity of technological development brings long-term difficulties in the management of intellectual and creative output in digital form. Libraries and museums have a key role in the preservation of analytical and creative endeavors over the long term. However, most libraries are ill equipped to undertake research into the preservation of new media artefact's and creations. Where the preservation of printed works is well understood, issues of obsolescence of new media technologies affect all aspects of the new media artefact's. As each new technological innovation introduces new methods of creative content delivery, our long-term horizons of archive planning appear to reduce. The widespread adoption of Information Technology as an integral part of the research process, and the speciation of software vehicles for content creation, mean that on the basis both of cost and volume of content creation the meagre budgets of most libraries simple are not sufficient to sustain the role of comprehensive collection builders. Digital library collection building has associated with it inherent risks of technological obsolescence. In addition to the systematic risks associated to critical information technology architecture, are the problems of software and hardware obsolescence. Issues of obsolescence are not inherent obstacles to the move to management of electronic resources – but they are issues that need to be addressed by the institution in the management of the disparate resources that constitute an electronic collection. Information systems inevitably go through a continuous series of transformations over time, as do digital objects stored in an information system. Where the Parliamentary library is responsible for the management of assets created by the Parliament, the systematic management of these assets through the workflow and digital library systems is an important role of the library.

Electronic collection development

Because of the complexity of the resources in this area a systematic digital collection development policy is required to effectively integrate the disparate digital resources. This collection development process should entail a a review of electronic collection requirements. For parliamentary libraries, the typical focus of end user requirements is for access to Parliamentary archives in digital form, New and current affairs feeds and current awareness bulletins, dissemination of Press releases and other member information, and access to born digital resources such as electronic books and e-journal resources.

The library should undertake an asset audit to determine the needs/requirements for support of digitization for preservation of assets for preservation. On-demand digitization requirements to support reference services, document delivery and alerting services (eg full text disseminating of news items in relation to Parliament and its members) should also be reviewed.

Digital Feeds (news services)

Parliamentary members and their staff rely on access to current information on news and developments. Typically news feeds will be sourced by commercial news gathering agencies that provide selective dissemination of information relevant to organisations. For Parliaments this may include:

  • news items on or about parliamentary members
  • press releases

NewsML (www.newsml.org) is the most commonly used XML interchange standard for disseminating the metadata associated with news items (http://www.iptc.org/site/Home/). Selective dissemination agencies will typically provide the full text news content and associated NewsML metadata to subscribing agencies.

The role of the parliamentary library can be to disseminate this information, and possibly also to aggregate this information in a digital library. Typically this process will entail:

  • receipt of data feeds for dissemination agents comprising NewsML metadata and the text or PDF versions of the articles
  • workflow processes to ingest this information into a local digital library store - for instance of member press releases
  • dissemination functions (through the intranet, extranet, website and RSS) to deliver this information to Parliamentary members and library clients.

Some content (such as news feeds) may be subject to licensing restrictions that limit the extent to which content is disseminated. In this context it may be necessary to limit access to the electronic repository or digital library in which this content resides. Many of the digital library systems provide the workflow processes for ingestion and selective access to digital content.

Metadata and metadata standards

Inter-operability, RDF & Semantic Web

Digital library systems: Workflow, Ingestion/Digitization (including for parliamentary documents) & Digital preservation

Workflow management is crucial to digital library operation. One of the challenges to institutional acceptance is the efficiency of the ingestion process. The more complex the workflow, the less likely the institutional buy-in on the system. The open design of of the digital library system in this area is important - focus on systems that have adaptable means for ingestion is important - for example to allow the addition of “plug-ins” adapted by institutions to suite their local preference for file uploads. Dspace for instance supports several paths for file uploads, including:

  • An integrated, highly structured and configurable web-based workflow system
  • A batch-oriented file upload system for bulk ingestion
  • Use of plug-ins or internally built workflows using API's (Application Programming Interfaces

The broad institutional adoption of a system is one of the factors that can be a factor in the breadth of support in functionality “around” the product that supports such functions.

The complexity of the digital library system adopted by a parliamentary library depends a great deal on the nature of the digital library requirements. Some systems focus on the archival role: the long term preservation and management of the digital resource. Some systems focus on the presentational role: the ease of discovery of the digital resource. Large volume digitisation projects (such as Parliamentary Archives) may require a focus on strong workflow systems.

Your digital library system will change over time. These changes may entail institutional name changes, website redesigns or changes to the website platform. The print form of a book or a journal has the virtue of a static nature: the content is the same for all readers for a given publication. Distributed access is simple. Personalisation, on the other hand, dispenses with any degree of finality of information delivery: the content delivery may be different for each individual. Without a fixed point of reference in which content can be thought to have reached a “final” form – that is, which is essentially dynamic, the issues of attempting to preserve content in its final generated form become problematic. One way of supporting the portability of electronic resources through website and organisational changes is the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). These generally entail the registration of objects through a central referencing agency that provides a proxy-based reference to the current web page/resource location. Dspace, for instance, includes full integration with the public DOI handle.net service (Corporation for National Research Initiatives 2010). It also incorporates functionality to host and manage your own DOI handle service.

Case Study

http://ifl.sagepub.com/content/33/3/251.short

Malackova, Eva and Sosna, Karel. The Joint Czech and Slovak Digital Parliamentary Library. IFLA Journal October 2007 vol. 33 no. 3 251-257

The award-winning common digital parliamentary library embracing the two parliaments of the Check and Slovak republics represents a valuable case study in the integration of digital resources thr



E-Books, E-Journals and electronic consortia arrangements

The transition to electronic delivery of traditional print publications is well underway in many libraries. Library clients show a strong preference for electronic over print for research and information discovery. This has driven a rapid transition in collection development in many libraries to the management of electronic subscriptions to resources.

It is in the area of journal subscriptions where the transition to an electronic delivery is the most evident. Access to electronic resources to support reference and research services can be achieved either through direct subscription with the relevant journal publisher or distributor. There are a number of aggregate providers of electronic journal subscriptions, either through database vendors or through consortia arrangements negotiated by groups of libraries or at the national level.

As part of the licensing subscription the library should consider requirements for local archiving of the electronic journals subscription. Where publishers allow, it may be possible to store electronic journal articles in a local digital library (with appropriate restrictions for access). Such a local archive provides for long-term archival management of important digital subscriptions and may also provide a useful knowledge resource when integrated with other assets in the local digital library (such as integration with Federated search tools used in the library).

Supporting hardware may also be required for library clients - such as e-book readers. The library may need to maintain and lend a collection of e-book/e-resource readers for the members.

Open Access Journals

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals Project Libraries Lund University in Sweden from one place makes freely available technical and scientific journals, databases and quality is constantly monitored. At present, it is more than 2,700 journal titles, of which 810 is available at the level of the full text. Number of articles has already crossed the 134500th Thematically journals covering all disciplines and all languages. The service allows you to search by subject or by title or journal article (eng).


Single sign-on

As the number of electronic resources managed by the library grows, so does the complexity of accessing these resources. Many subscription providers of electronic resources will have different sign-on methodologies to access their resources. In this context the library faces the challenge of providing simple access to underlying resources that are delivered in quite complex and different ways.

The simplest methodology for access, offered by many providers, is IP address authentication. This entails providing access to the underlying electronic resource based on the Internet address(es) of your library. This allows your library members to access these resources when used locally at the library. This approach requires no further authentication by the user. The solution has one principle weakness: remote users cannot access the service unless they gain access through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) style of access. This weakness is sometimes address by adding a further layer of software: the proxy server. The role of the proxy server is to locally authenticate users and then pass their web page requests through a local “proxy” service which fetches the web pages from the remote service on their behalf.

Another approach widely used by libraries is Single Sign-on. Users of your service authenticate only once (for instance through your library management system or through your intranet sign-on). This authentication automatically provides the necessary authentication to remote electronic databases. Two systems have gained acceptance in libraries:

  • Athens - a commercial single sign-on service that has a wide number of relationships with existing electronic database vendors
  • Shibboleth - an open source framework for developing your own single sign-on service.

The choice of service depends a great deal on your current infrastructure and capabilities. While Shibboleth is gaining acceptance it requires local development and integration work to enable. Athens authentication is often already integrated in existing library applications.

As with authentication, the growing number of electronic resources provided by the library can provide a discovery challenge for the library members. In addition to the ILMS catalogue, the library may have access to several Online databases of electronic full text content (such as journal subscriptions). The library may also have specific journal subscriptions separate from these consortia database subscriptions. This is often managed by a “databases” reference page on the local intranet or website. This requires the reference services and library clients to discriminate the most appropriate electronic resource for a given query. As the complexity of these resources grows, federated searching becomes an important factor in your library architecture.

Google itself has focused on providing a “single” search framework which is in fact a heterogeneous set of search engines, including:

  • Google Search
  • Google Scholar search
  • Google Maps search
  • Google “my library”

Commercial providers such as Serials Solutions provide software such as “Summon” which provides a single search platform across both the local catalogue and electronic subscription content.

Some open source library management systems can also provide a platform for federated searching. For instance, Koha provides search capabilities through the Zebra search engine. This engine can itself index different types of resources (such as your digital library content). This opens the possibility of making your catalogue not only a portal to the physical assets managed by your library but also a metadata hub to the wider electronic assets managed by the library.

Standards

Metadata

  • NewsML : a widely used standard for dissemination and metadata description of news items & resources.

Digital libraries & archives

Software

Single Sign On

  • Shibboleth http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/: an open-source single sign-on software framework.
  • Athens: a commercial system which integrates with many current consortia subscription vendors such as EBSCO and Proquest
  • EzProxy http://www.oclc.org/ezproxy/: proxy software widely used by libraries to provide access to underlying IP-address authenticated resources.
  • Active Directory - Microsoft's single-sign-on technology
  • LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol: a commonly used protocol for single-sign-on to systems - many software packages support LDAP to allow a single authentication on local systems.

Digital Library

  • Dspace www.dspace.org: Dspace provides an integrated solution to the digital library. It has a built-in workflow for document ingestions. Its presentation layer is highly structured, allowing content to be divided into collections, sub-collections and communities. It is very widely used, internationally and as a result support exists. It has a strong support for language internationalisation. Dspace has 96 language packs.
  • EPrints www.eprints.org: EPrints, like Dspace, has a wide installation base, and is popular as a method for digital resource delivery. It has a smaller base of language internationalisation and is more focused on the presentation layer/user interface than Dspace. It is an integrated solution. EPrints has 19 language packs.
  • FEDORA - Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture http://fedora.commons.org: Fedora provides a systematic tool for management of digital archives. As such it is not an integrated digital library solution such as E-prints or Dspace, but provides the archival base for a digital library system. It can therefore serve a role as the core component of a Digital Asset Management system, Digital Library system or archive for a Content Management system. Dspace and Fedora have announced a project to work together on an approach that allows a Dspace front-end to a Fedora archive. https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/DSpace-Fedora+Integration+FAQ
  • Greenstone www.greenstone.org: Greenstone was developed by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato and has been supported by UNESCO. It has a strong base of implementation in Non-Governmental organisations and has four core language packs: English, French, Spanish and Russian.
  • KETE http://kete.net.nz/: Kete is a further contribution of the Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications Ltd. funded to the open source community. Like Koha, it has a good presentation layer and is more focused on the user interface than the underlying archival management of the digital resources. Kete has 21 language packs.
  • KNOWLEDGE TREE http://www.knowledgetree.com/: Knowledge Tree is a document management system that uses the Amazon S3/Cloudfront to store data.
  • Sirsi Dynix Hyperion

Aggregate Electronic Resource Providers

  • Zebra http://www.indexdata.com/zebra: “Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (e.g.. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.”
  • Summon http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/: Summon is designed to provide access to the entirety of a library's collection, be it journal articles, books, or media clippings, through a single search that provides relevancy-ranked lists of results. This is a product from the Proquest family and is integrated tightly with their databases.
  • EBSCO Discovery Service http://www.ebscohost.com/discovery: Another all-in-one package, integrated with EBSCOHost's large number of databases.
  • Google http://google.com: As it creates more specialized features, like Google Scholar, Google Maps and customized Google indexes Google slowly takes over more of the market.


Case Study

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digital.1308224843.txt.gz · Last modified: 2011/09/04 15:20 (external edit)

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