Accessing a national digital library: an architecture for the UK DNER Andy Powell ELAG 2001, Prague 7 June 2001 UKOLN, University of Bath UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.

ELAG 2001, Prague 2 Contents what is the DNER vision content functionality network systems architecture discover access

ELAG 2001, Prague 3 What is the DNER? Distributed National Electronic Resource …but the name may change! An initiative of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Not new… in that JISC has been funding provision of collections of information for a long time …but DNER more coordinated provided within shared architectural framework

ELAG 2001, Prague 4 The vision... a national digital library... for higher and further education a distributed resource supporting learning and research in the UK a managed collection of resources heterogeneous… bibliographic, images, data, video, geospatial, etc. an information environment that enables people to discover, access and use a wide variety of quality assured resources heterogeneous, services / content, local / remote, digital / physical, JISC funded / not JISC funded

ELAG 2001, Prague 5 Primary Content Secondary Content Funded Institutional External Web pages Museums home pages theses research papers OPACs Institutional gateways Google Yahoo Northern Light RDN A&I images Full-text statistics Map data COPAC Amazon Public libraries courseware DNER scope by content

ELAG 2001, Prague 6 DNER collections content typically in the form of ‘collections’ where collection is one or more items collections of stuff (text, images, data,...) collections of metadata about stuff (e.g subject gateway’s, library catalogues) local collections, ‘JISC’ collections, other collections network services make digital collections available at digital ‘locations’ real services make physical collections available at physical ‘locations’ people access content through services

ELAG 2001, Prague 7 DNER services a variety of ‘content provision’ services make current digital collections available most are Web-based (some use of Z39.50) in some cases ‘we’ (the education community) develop and control the services that make collections available in some cases collections are tightly bound to their user-interfaces - i.e. collection owners control form of access

ELAG 2001, Prague 8 DNER scope by function simple underlying functional model discover, access, use characterised in the solution to two problems portal problem - how to provide seamless discovery across multiple content providers appropriate-copy problem - how to provide access to the most appropriate copy of a resource (given access rights, preferences, cost, speed of delivery, etc.) also needs to support collaboration and creation but not considered here

ELAG 2001, Prague 9 Web Content (local and remote) End-user Current services offer mix of discover, access and use functionality End-user needs to join services together manually - as well as learning multiple user interfaces Current service architecture Authentication Authorisation

ELAG 2001, Prague 10 Information environment current services are human-oriented DNER architecture provides framework for shared machine-oriented services DNER as coherent whole rather than lots of stand-alone services two areas in particular... discover finding stuff across multiple content providers access streamlining access to appropriate copy

ELAG 2001, Prague 11 Discover want to allow end-user to discover across several network services... to support this, services need to expose content for machine to machine (m2m) use expose metadata about their content for searching harvesting alerting develop services that bring stuff together portals

ELAG 2001, Prague 12 Portals portals provide access to multiple network services there will be many kinds of portals... subject portals data centre portals institutional portals personal portals (agents) virtual learning environments thin portals (shallow linking) thick portals (deep linking, richer discovery and use functionality)

ELAG 2001, Prague 13 Web Searching Content End-user Portal Z39.50 Bath Profile Broker Authentication Authorisation Collect’n Desc Service Desc HTTP

ELAG 2001, Prague 14 Z Bath Profile search and retrieve support portal and broker cross-searching Bath Profile based on existing profiles cross-domain focus (in part) unqualified Dublin Core DC XML records DTD-based rather than XML Schema

ELAG 2001, Prague 15 Web Sharing Content End-user Portal Open Archives Initiative Aggregator Authentication Authorisation Collect’n Desc Service Desc HTTP

ELAG 2001, Prague 16 Open Archives Initiative OAI Metadata Harvesting Framework simple mechanism for sharing metadata records records shared over HTTP as XML (using XML Schema) unqualified Dublin Core client can ask metadata server for all records all records modified in last ‘n’ days See

ELAG 2001, Prague 17 Web Alerting Content End-user Portal RSS Aggregator Authentication Authorisation Collect’n Desc Service Desc HTTP

ELAG 2001, Prague 18 RSS RDF Site Summary RDF/XML application for syndicated news feeds (RSS 1.0) pointers and simple descriptions of news items (not the items themselves) makes use of DC elements previous versions based on XML (RSS 0.9) no querying - just regular ‘gathering’ of RSS file

ELAG 2001, Prague 19 Common sense need shared understanding and metadata practice across whole range of services need to agree ‘cataloguing guidelines’ and terminology in 4 key areas subject classification audience level (who is this resource aimed at?) resource type (what kind of resource is this?) certification (who has created this resource?)

ELAG 2001, Prague 20 Access discovery phase results in metadata about a resource metadata will include its identifier or a locator for Web resources a URL is common identifier/locator needs to be persistent enable lecturers to embed it into learning resources enable students to embed it into multimedia essays enable people to cite it

ELAG 2001, Prague 21 Identifiers/locators also need to think about what is identified...? the resource (e.g. an image) the resource in context (e.g. image embedded into Web page) metadata about the resource (e.g. description of image) probably need to identify all of these need guidelines on good practice for use of URLs investigate use of DOIs

ELAG 2001, Prague 22 Resolving identifiers may need to resolve the metadata, identifier or locator into information about how to request a particular instance of the resource this is done using resolvers resolvers find appropriate copy location is context sensitive - need to know who end-user is, where they are and what they have access to may be best carried out locally to end- user?

ELAG 2001, Prague 23 OpenURL metadata, identifier or locator forms a ‘citation’ for the resource OpenURL - way to encode citation for a resource &isbn= OpenURL resolves differently for different people my OPAC, my online bookstore vs. your OPAC, your online bookstore bibliographic focus currently...

ELAG 2001, Prague 24 OpenURL resolver Content End-user Delivery service Authentication Authorisation Collect’n Desc Service Desc Resolver Portal OpenURL HTTP Inst’n Profile

ELAG 2001, Prague 25 shared services portals content brokers and aggregators Information environment provision fusion infrastructure presentation m2m interfaces

ELAG 2001, Prague 26 Summary people, institutions, content, services discover, access, use discover - search (Z39.50/Bath Profile), share (OAI), alert (RSS) - Dublin Core metadata access - OpenURL and resolvers services presentation, fusion, provision, infrastructure portals, brokers and aggregators, content providers, shared services cataloguing rules subject, type, audience, certification