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UKOLN is supported by: D2D - a modest vision (but which ‘D’ is which?) Paul Walk Technical Manager [email protected] A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk

Delivery to Discovery

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a deliberately provocative, very short presentation on discovery to delivery

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Page 1: Delivery to Discovery

UKOLN is supported by:

D2D - a modest vision (but which ‘D’ is which?)

Paul WalkTechnical [email protected]

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Page 2: Delivery to Discovery

a map? an architecture? a vision?

Page 3: Delivery to Discovery

a map? an architecture? a vision?

that’s me at the bottom, scratching my head....

Page 4: Delivery to Discovery

a map? an architecture? a vision?

that’s me at the bottom, scratching my head....

being asked to design an architecture is a thankless task - you're basically designing the thing which everyone is going to blame in a few years time and attaching your name to it....

Page 5: Delivery to Discovery

a map? an architecture? a vision?

that’s me at the bottom, scratching my head....

being asked to design an architecture is a thankless task - you're basically designing the thing which everyone is going to blame in a few years time and attaching your name to it....

...however, being asked to present a vision is a relatively risk-free proposition: if your vision doesn't come to pass it is because the idiot person designing the architecture got it wrong

Page 6: Delivery to Discovery

a map? an architecture? a vision?

that’s me at the bottom, scratching my head....

being asked to design an architecture is a thankless task - you're basically designing the thing which everyone is going to blame in a few years time and attaching your name to it....

...however, being asked to present a vision is a relatively risk-free proposition: if your vision doesn't come to pass it is because the idiot person designing the architecture got it wrong

not convinced that discovery and delivery fit together in a coherent architecture

Page 7: Delivery to Discovery

a map? an architecture? a vision?

that’s me at the bottom, scratching my head....

being asked to design an architecture is a thankless task - you're basically designing the thing which everyone is going to blame in a few years time and attaching your name to it....

...however, being asked to present a vision is a relatively risk-free proposition: if your vision doesn't come to pass it is because the idiot person designing the architecture got it wrong

not convinced that discovery and delivery fit together in a coherent architecture

3 ideas: - the broker - community search ‘memory’ - third party search interfaces

Page 8: Delivery to Discovery

tensions

• amateur v professional– note that professionalism is not an intrinsic quality in the researcher - it depends also on

context - a person can be either of these at different times

• harvest v (cross)search– harvesting works (Google, RSS)

• direct v mediated– we haven’t replaced the librarian with software so much as moved the task to the

researcher

– does the researcher get a service as good as the very best that they might have received from a subject librarian ten years ago?

• recall v precision– the perception is that Google is king of recall. But (according to Stuart Weibel of OCLC)

Google and Microsoft continue to invest in metadata. This one will continue to run and run....

• active v passive / push v pull– active search versus ‘passive’ subscription

Page 9: Delivery to Discovery

today - what we could be doing already

• making the machine APIs the heart of our services– a good design principle is to use the machine API as the API used by our own user-

interfaces

– we just can’t know for sure all the ways in which our information services might be used

• reducing barriers to third-parties developing other (competing!?) UIs– are our UIs really just ‘gateways’ to information (implying that there is a wall around that

information)

– any UIs we develop should add value

– really rapid/agile response to new requirements

• surfacing the expertise of the subject librarian/specialist in the services we provide

– but....consider exploiting the wisdom of the community where possible

• re-evaluating the ‘harvest’ model– light-weight harvesting on the rise

– RSS & OpenSearch

• using web protocols– Z39.50 alone is a barrier to participation in Web 2.0

– SRU - isn’t this a ‘no-brainer’?

Page 10: Delivery to Discovery

a (modest) vision - what we might consider next

• personal harvesting– subscription and saved searches

– RSS

– the “finely tuned antennae”

– I no longer want to search for information in many cases but to register my interest and then sit back and wait for results to be delivered.

– searching is an expensive activity I want to reserve for particular occasions

– a growing issue is how to manage and search/mine the information which has already been delivered (semi-automatically) to me

• filtered delivery - more fine tuning• an architecture which allows the user (and community) to make

gestures of interest and which is capable of responding to them– gestures might include:

• explicit registration of interest (saved searches, RSS subscriptions etc.)• personal profiling (e.g. “this is who I am and what I do - you decide what might be

interesting to me”)• search history - automatic profiling• community profiling - ‘hot topics’ and the ‘people who were interested in ‘x’ were also

interested in ‘y’ model

Page 11: Delivery to Discovery

from

discovery -> delivery

to

gesture -> delivery -> discovery