Threats or Opportunities? Resources in the New Information Landscape William E. Moen Texas Center for Digital Knowledge School of Library and Information Sciences University of North Texas

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, What/how to expose? How to find?

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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?

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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?

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Exposing/Finding Option 1

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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?

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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Exposing/Finding Option 2

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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, What are repositories?

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Repository types Digital repository (sort of a generic term) Image repository (e.g., Learning objects repository (e.g., bin/WebObjects/CAREO.woa?theme=careo) Data repository (e.g., Institutional repository (e.g., Differentiated by Types of objects Types of metadata Purpose …

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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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 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 Characterized by: Organizational commitment to long-term stewardship Open access

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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) …

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Cornell Repository

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Texas A&M Repository

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Texas A&M

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Texas A&M

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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)

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Dempsey’s acronymic density or 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. …this is the present future!!

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Extending the visibility – OAI-PMH Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting tml 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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, OAI architecture

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Harvesting metadata From:

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, OAIster results: library reference services

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Exposing/Finding Option 3

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Exposing/Finding Option 4

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, Exposing/Finding Option 5

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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.

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, MasterKey

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, 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

MoenReference Round Table -- Texas Library Association -- April 12, References Institutional Repositories. Roy Tennant CA242297&publication=libraryjournal Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age. Clifford A. Lynch OAI-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting OAI for Beginners - the Open Archives Forum online tutorial OAIster.org Index Data Master Key Z39.50 and Search and Retrieve Web Service (SRU/SRW) For a copy of this presentation, go to: