Digital Library Collections & Services

Roy TennantCalifornia Digital Library

Questions, Questions, Questions

• You will leave with more questions than answers

• If I do my job right, they will be the right questions

• Feel free to ask questions as we go along

““It was the best of times, it It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”was the worst of times…”

— A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The Common Perception

The Reality

• Too many information sources • A lack of human assistance • Not enough ways to filter, sort, and

narrow in on what is needed• Access is limited to what is free, or what

has been purchased or rented on behalf of a clientele

• Many useful resources are only available in print

The Most Commonly Proposed Solution

Digital Library Myths

• Having everything in digital form will solve our information access problems

• Soon (or eventually) everything will be digital• Any collection of digital objects can be a

digital library• Everyone agrees about what comprises a

“digital library” and how to build one

A Digital Library Is…• A collection of digital objects and/or

information that is:– Selected– Organized– Made Accessible– Preserved

• A set of services that help you to find and use those objects and information

• Often supported by a physical collection and always by professional staff

Outline• Digital Library Collections

– Licensing or Buying Collections– Digitizing Collections– Publishing– Providing Access to Remote Collections

• Digital Library Services– Library Catalogs– Metasearching– Online Reference

Digital Library Collections

• Licensing or Buying Collections

• Digitizing Collections

• Publishing

Licensing or Buying

• Licensing more common than buying (but what do you have in the end?)

• Libraries are increasingly demanding ownership, and/or content held in escrow

• “The time to advocate change is before you sign” - Beverlee French, CDL

Digitizing Collections

• Start and end with your users and the services you wish to provide

• Review what others have done • Digitize at the highest quality that you can,

and save an unprocessed copy• Capture as much metadata as you can, in

highly granular fields, and store it in a form from which you can extract it without loss

Metadata• “Cataloging by those paid better than

librarians”• Structured information about an object or

collection of objects• Types:

– Descriptive– Administrative– Structural– Preservation

Core Metadata Standards

• Dublin Core: a set of basic fields primarily for systems interoperability

• MODS: a MARC-like bibliographic format• METS: a structural standard for encapsulating

a digital object or set of digital objects, including one or more segments of descriptive and/or administrative metadata

Publishing

• Libraries are increasingly becoming involved with publishing activities

• University libraries are capturing scholarship before it leaves campus, and making it freely available to all

• Two examples:– Repositories– Book publishing

Repositories• Two flavors:

– Institutional (e.g., MIT)– Topic (e.g., Physics)

• Characteristics:– Often author-maintained; therefore metadata may be of

uneven quality/quantity– Usually compliant with the Open Archives Initiative

harvesting protocol

• Benefits:– Captures a grey literature not always collected by libraries– If OAI-compliant, can be “crawled” and indexed

http://arxiv.org/

Dspace screen shot

http://dspace.org/http://dspace.mit.edu/

http://repositories.cdlib.org/

Books & Journals

• Academic libraries, faculty, and university presses are teaming up:– Faculty write and edit– Libraries provide technical expertise, online access,

persistence, professional collection management– University presses provide editing, print publication,

imprimatur, marketing

• Case Study: University of California

XML

• A method of creating and using tags to identify the structure and contents of a document — not how it should be displayed

• The tags used can be arbitrary or can come from a specification

• XML is instrumental for sharing information between applications

Transforming XML

• XML Stylesheet Language — Transformations (XSLT)– A markup language and programming syntax for processing

XML – Used to transform XML to another format (e.g., to HTML for

delivery to standard web clients) or from one set of tags to another

• An XML parser• A method to bring all the pieces together if serving to

the web (e.g., CGI program, Java servlet, etc.)

Bookencodedin XML

Information

Transformation

Web Server

XSLTStylesheet Presentation

XHTML Document

(no displaymarkup)*

HTMLStylesheet

(CSS)

* Dynamic document

XML & XSLT Demonstration

Library Catalogs

• We seem to be unable to provide an easy and effective information locating tool

• Keep in mind that only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find

• We are even failing at things we have explicitly tried to do

• Let’s take a look at the evidence…

Typical Searches

• Known Item

• “A Few Good Things”

• Comprehensive

Typical Searches: Known Item

• The good: searches can be limited to a particular field: author, title, etc.

• The bad: limiting to a particular field doesn’t always act the way you expect

Typical Searches:“A Few Good Things”

• The one type of search we have so far ignored in library system design

• A type of search that we can do something about today

• Bring Google-style relevance to library catalogs (e.g., for union catalogs, sort by number of holding libraries)

Typical Searches: Comprehensive

• Most library catalogs hide many things available via regional cooperative or ILL

• It is difficult to search all appropriate journal databases

• Most libraries do not provide good access to gray literature and web sites

• Subject headings are often unintuitive, and catalogs give no guidance

The Rescue of Print

• Many library users want only that which is convenient (read digital)

• Print resources are, therefore, increasingly overlooked (I call this the “convenience catastrophe”)

• We must fight this trend by enriching our catalog records with tables of contents, indexes, book covers, etc. to entice users to print books

Digital Reference

• Putting the human help where it’s needed — online• Software is now available that provides for:

– Queuing of patrons with audible alerts– Chat between librarian and user– Push web pages to the user– Form sharing– Highlighting on the user’s screen– “Follow me” browsing– Saved and/or emailed transcripts– Statistics

Interoperability

• The digital library “holy grail”• Main requirement: widespread adoption of

specific standards and protocols• Progress:

– XML as the basic syntax– OAI provides a harvesting model– METS, MODS, and DC are key metadata

standards– Technologies such as Web Services provide real-

time interoperability

Understanding the Landscape

• We must provide access to more resources than ever before

• Many are digital, some are not• Some are interoperable, many are not• We need to find ways to build unified user services

from a disparate collection of resources• Tools and strategies for doing this are becoming

available (see OCLC Research Works, for example)

Trends

• More and faster change (“change is the only constant”)

• Better control of, and access to, historically difficult to access materials (e.g., working papers, data sets, etc.)

• More publication options:– Digital repositories– Institution-based peer-reviewed publication avenues

(journals, books, etc.)

• A greater diversity of material types:– Multimedia, data, etc.

A Few Technologies and Trends to Watch

• Repository systems• Systems for online peer review and publication• New kinds of “cataloging” (e.g., Dublin Core, METS,

MODS)• XML• Open Archives Initiative • Web services• Metasearching

The Right Questions to Ask

• What do we need to do to serve our users better?• How can we build an infrastructure that can be used for

a variety of purposes?• How can we better integrate access to print and digital

material?• How can we interoperate with other systems and

services?• What should we stop doing so we can do what is more

important?

Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!