Resource discovery & information sharing: reaching the 2.0 turn

Bonaria Biancu aka The Geek LibrarianBiblioteca di AteneoUniversità di Milano-Bicocca

Trento, ITC-IRST-SRA21-22 Agosto 2006

Web 2.0

October 2004 – Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0

– The web as a platform – Harnessing collective intelligence– Rich user experience– The long tail– Hackability– Perpetual beta– Architecture of participation– Granular accessibility of content– …

Library 2.0

September 2005 – Michael Casey (Library Crunch) coined the term Library 2.0 = web 2.0 concepts and applications in the LIS realm (but there isn’t agreement on the definition)

and also… Librarian 2.0 = Librarian + Web 2.0

L2 is not just technology, it is an attitude (nevertheless web 2.0 is a

significant part of the equation)

What – How – Why (from a geek lib perspective)

What: ILS disaggregation, recombination and integration [see Talis]

How: (open code/standards +) API, Mashups [see Programmable Web], AJAX [see OJAX], Greasemonkey [see LibraryThing Thing], Firefox Plugins [see Del.icio.us search plugins]…

Why: Putting libraries out of the walled gardens (breaking information silos)

=> remix content – foster user participationEarly adopters: WPOPAC, Penn Tags

How L2 works in libraries

OPAC 2.0: records tagging, RSS for search results, acquisitions and alerts, user agents, openurl, federated search, user reviews, open search, recommendations, communities (Googlezon model)

Subject based wikis Bloglines trusted feeds Library blogs IM reference RSS alerts for library news Pod-video-casting guides to library services Personal search engines for reference (Swiki, Gigablast) Collaborative web (MySpace, Protopage, NetVibes…) for communicating with

users OPML [see L2 ALA blog], social bookmarking [see Del.icio.us], and social

tagging [CiteULike, Flickr…] for integration with VLEs …

Scout Portal Toolkit: a Resource Description, Organization and Discovery Tool

A project funded by Mellon Foundation, builded by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Internet Scout Project in 2000

Now (2006) fully tested – vers. 1.4.x (1.3.1 adopted by UNIMIB)

In Italy 4 instances: VL Cilea, AIB-DFP, FORMEZ, UNIMIB; others coming

Abroad: lots… (National Finnish Library Science Link House is a very good model)

Scout @ UNIMIB = LINX – Link e strumenti X la ricerca

System Configuration: layout, search options, users rights… Metadata Field Editor: DCMES - ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2001,

some DC qualifiers, some fields (overlapping) IEEE LOM Web based apps Import/Export features Different levels of workflow editing Vocabulary control UTF-8 support User Preferences

Metadata structure

Metadata Field Editor Type of Fields: Text, Paragraph, Number,

Date, Flag, Controlled Name, Option, Classification, Image

name, type, description, default value, qualifier, min-max value, inclusion in advanced/keyword search and weight of the field set by Metadata Field Editor (LINX admin)

Resource description

Some of the 15 DC Simple (not all publicly viewable) + dumb down cataloging rules

Fields not implemented: alternate title, audience, rights, contributor, source, relation, coverage, email address, dates

Mandatory fields: URL, Title, Description, Date issued, Release Flag DCAP for UNIMIB: neither formalized nor strict (=> see values for

‘type’ field) Titolo (i.e. DC ‘title’) => text field Classificazione (i.e. DC ‘subject’) => Classification field: 13 Library

disciplinary areas + 2 additional about reference tools

Resource description

Parola chiave (i.e. DC ‘subject’) => Controlled Name field: TRT (Thesaurus Regione Toscana) + un-controlled terms provided by catalogers

Descrizione (i.e. DC ‘description’)=> Paragraph field: free text provided by catalogers

Autore (i.e. DC ‘creator’) => Controlled Name field Editore (i.e. DC ‘publisher’) => Controlled Name

field Tipo di risorsa (i.e. DC ‘type’) => Option field: only

some terms from ‘DC type vocabulary’

Resource description

Lingua (ie. DC ‘language’) => Option field Formato (i.e. DC ‘format’) => Option field Data ultima modifica (i.e. DC ‘date’)

=> Date field: date of record last editing (chosen within the ‘date’ options offered by Scout => ‘date issued’, ‘date of record creation’, ‘date record checked’ and ‘date last modified’)

URL (i.e. DC ‘identifier’) – but it may be also a DOI or a handle or an ISBN or...

Release Flag (proprietary tag) => Flag field ID record creator/modifier (proprietary tag) => not editable

Additional features implementedfor LINX

Linkchecker (for each registered user/each resource): score based on server response

Segnala una risorsa: web form for non-authenticated users

Statistics (for each resource) => coming soon

Features not implemented for resource description

DC Qualifiers

Features not implemented for resource description

OAI Mapping

Additional features not implemented

Forum Layout preferences

for users

Resource organization

Browsing tree Last n resources in home page Brief and full display records Linkable tags: ‘classificazione’, ‘parola chiave’,

‘autore’, ‘editore’, ‘tipo di risorsa’, ‘lingua’, ‘formato’ RSS Import/Export records

(Not all fields are viewable from not authenticated users)

Resource discovery

Browsing tree Simple search Advanced search (with filtering and max-num results

option) Cross-field search RSS Saved search Mail alerts Recommendations

Interaction with users and other L2 features

RSS Saved search Mail alerts (user agent) Recommendations Resource comments (some HTML tags allowed) Resource ratings Filtering search options & customization of records display per

page Thumbnail for book jackets, ejournal covers, website

screenshots Admin tracking user comments

Interaction with users and other L2 features

OAI-PMH compliance for resource harvesting Import/Export in tab-delimited format for data echange with

RDN-like hubs News & Forum for community building Dynamic layout (accessibility + user preferences) Web based configuration and management Open Source – frequent new versions – developers all over the

world Interoperability and open standards (XML, PHP, MySQL, Dublin

Core, OAI – o.s. required: Linux, but also tested on Windows)

Enjoying L2 - from LINX…

Classification: factoring disciplinary areas in more specific classes (facets?)

Clustering (grouping search results by type, format, language…)

RSS feeds for disciplinary areas + search alerts Get recommendations along with records, not separately Sfx (min-opt): setting Scout as a web search option from Sfx

menu Sfx: link to an OpenUrl generator for resource URL field Metalib: setting Scout as a resource [see NELLI – OAI

searching via MetaIndex] Exposing metadata for OAI harvesting Integration with VLEs, CMSs etc.

Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS

OPAC-related features:– Catalogers: authority control for author, title, publisher,

classification, subject fields– Catalogers: mapping UNIMARC/DC for linking between records

(see: DC relation and source or UNIMARC 452 and 856 fields) Sfx (max-opt): deep linking in Scout from Sfx menu Federated search: whether by ‘web resource’ type/format or not

[see OpenWorldCat & FRBR specs] Open search: Scout as a target [see A9] Single sign-on both for OPAC, Metalib, Scout and… users

Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS

Adding tags to resources for authenticated users [recall-precision]

Displaying tag cloud in homepage (personal tag cloud for authenticated users)

‘Scout this’ bookmarklet (or right-click) to capture web resources and their metadata: title, url, screenshot… depending on how structured they are; classification if sharing schemes is possible – see compliance with repositories like E-LIS in CiteULike

‘Scout this’ for Socializer-like applications Community features [related tags/users, ‘users that visit x also

visit y’…] to be included in Recommendations list

Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS

Catalogers: setting back-office tools for resource discovery (OPML, importing records from subject gateways, Del.icio.us-like ‘Links for you’…)

Catalogers: displaying entries from thesauri when adding/editing controlled names and DC schemas and vocabularies when adding/editing option lists [see post on TGL]

Ranking search results and => Sort results by relevance File upload Resource display à la Digg: resources that have received

highest rates go on the home page

Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS(how to test Ajax, API, Mashups, Greasmonkey)

Resource relations graphic display [see Grokker] Auto-completion of search terms Getting Amazon resource reviews Getting Google Scholar references Displaying tags from CiteULike or Connotea Scraping identifiers (names, DOIs etc.) related with

Scout resources [see LIBX] …

[see Connotea requested features to get suggestions]

Websites and articles

Scout Portal Toolkit LINX - Link e strumenti per la ricerca Virtual Library Cilea AIB-DFP FORMEZ - Biblioteca virtuale per la Pubblica Amministrazione Edward Almasy et al., Software for building a full-featured

discipline-based web portal, “D-Lib Magazine”, 8 (2002), 11 Edward Almasy, The Scout Portal Toolkit: an overview, ALA

Annual Conference, Atlanta, June 13-19, 2002 Edward Almasy, Tools for creating your own resource portal:

CWIS and the Scout Portal Toolkit, “Library Trends”, 54 (2005), 4

Collaboration

Wiki for sharing knowledge Records exchange Setting up a harvester (OAI, SRU/SRW…)

for searching against databases (every instance exposing its metadata)

…

Questions?

Acknowledgements:

we are here thanks to Paolo Avesani :-)

This work is published underCC license - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Italy