Archive for the 'Conferences' Category

ELAG 2008: creating a new services infrastructure for the European Library

Published on April 16, 2008 in Conferences. 0 Comments

Theo van Veen explains that the new infrastructure for the European Library services infrastructure started about two years ago. Web users have become accustomed to Google, Del.icio.us and Flcikr type of application for quite some time already. That means that libraries have to lower their barriers as well to encourage the users to use the library systems.

Library systems have to perceive, interpret and respond to user requests. He illustrates these new services on a demo machine where he translates the abstracts of a record as an option from a menu that appears onmouse over. Het actually lists about 15 different type of services hat re available in this way. An option to is follow on service which triggers a speech service that reads out the translated abstract. All responses can generate new requests. His demonstrator is full of nice little tricks.

The user can make service descriptions themselves, but the systems should learn from the user interactions with the system. It will add some intelligence to the portal.

At the end he comes the legal issues. TEL can’t be held responsible for what users are doing, so they try to work with trusted partners.

The portal is in in a test phase available at http://dev.theeuropeanlibrary.org/vga/SRUportal/

ELAG2008 : Can the library be a publisher ?

Published on April 15, 2008 in Conferences. 2 Comments

A presentation by Library Waaijers on open access at the university. His presentation has been used in the Dutch congress to celebrate the opening of the library in February. His presentation is therefore already available.

Leo takes the research article as an example, and explains the publishing and peer review process. In which authors normally pay with handing over their copyrights. In a newer model authors pay in cash for the review process. In brief these are the two publishing models.

The quality construct of academic journals is grounded in the impact factors. And Impact Factors are debated to say the least. On the latter he quotes Michael Mabe from Elsevier:

“Extending the use of the journal impact factor from the journal to the authors of papers in the journal is highly suspect; ……[impact factors] are not a direct measure of quality and must be used with considerable care.”

He shows us the Sherpa/Romeo categorization of copyright contracts. Reasearhcers want their articles to be published in high impact journals, that have high circulation and easily reused and presented on websites and cv’s. Preservation also matter to the researchers.

According to Leo it is time to act. The publishers won’t act. Authors, research funders and policy makers are acting al have acted. In the powerpoint of Leo he mentions (and links) many of these statements.

Leo then draws a call for proposal for Wageningen University as follows.

“Annually, WUR produces N articles in (sub) discipline Y. A consortium comprising WUR, the Ministry of Agriculture, FAO, NWO wants to tender the reviewing process for these articles under the following conditions:

  1. The reviewing process must be independent, rigorous and swift.
  2. The reviewing may be anonymous, named or open (to be decided on).
  3. All N articles will pass the reviewing process.
  4. As a result of the reviewing the articles are marked 1 to 5.
  5. Articles with marks 3 to 5 are accepted for posting in the Wageningen institutional repository and for immediate open publishing in Wageningen Yield 2.0 (in WUR house style).
  6. Subsequently authors may publish their articles in any journal.
  7. In their appraisal procedures for staff and research projects members of the consortium will weigh articles with marks 3, 4 and 5 as if they were published in journals with impact factors 3, 8 and 15 respectively (figures are nominal and subject to disciplinary calibration).
  8. The national library of the Netherlands will take care of the long term curation of the accepted articles

Proposals for a three year contract should be sent to ……The allocation of the contract will be based on the best price-performance ratio.”

Really interesting, but wonder when the time is there we actually get this idea sold.

ELAG2008: User centered design and the next generation OPAC - perfect match?

Published on April 15, 2008 in Conferences. 0 Comments

Three presenters are up. Kristin Olofsson start with quoting the three Karens on how OPACs suck. We can’t agree more with their observations. In Sweden they have attempted to build a new union catalog, which the built in various iterations.

She demonstrates the Libris catalog, which really looks very well done. Visually attractive at least. I think it will be interesting to play with that catalog a bit more.

Henrik Linstrom continues the presentation with  the explanation of user centred design, which was used to arrive at a new design for the Libris catalog. The UCD is really a long iteration of design and feedback from users. With various sociological methods, such as focus groups, workshop and surveys etc, they received user feedback.  Based on the various iterations they developed prototypes, and see what should be improved in the next round.

Martin Malmsten concludes the presentation in which he expands on the built in possibilities for continuous change.  The iteration cycles of development and testing took only about a month each. He quotes the Agile Manifesto. Their approach gave the develpoers more fun, albeit it was at times more demanding. But at the end of the day, it is also cheaper to follow this track of development.

ELAG2008: Second Life and Libraries

Published on April 15, 2008 in Conferences. 4 Comments

Bernadette Daly Swanson is presenting her experience in Second Life. She states that she doesn’t expect to jump in, but in the years to come a 3-D web will certainly become a reality. So to gain a little experience is really useful. However she hasn’t convinced her superiors yet on the usefulness of these experiences.

She quotes the 2007 horizon reports which predicts that by 2011 80% of us will be using virtual worlds. She shows us the SL version of the Public Library of Amsterdam.

A congressional hearing that were streamed to SL concentrated very much on negative aspects of Second Life. Since SL is a mirror world, negative aspect a bound to be around. She likes to stress the positive aspects.

She goes on to demonstrate SL live and meets Namro (aka as Guus) and Patrick (aka…) who are in the audience and logged in Second Life as well.

ELAG2008 day 1

Published on April 15, 2008 in Conferences. 0 Comments

The day started with a few mocking bloggers and computer users about the lack of wireless internet access in a brand new educational building at the Univeristy campus. I am sorry Patrick and Guus were  right. Luckily, well prepared, I brought some really long yellow cables and Patrick turned on the wifi on his laptop. So we cramped our style a bit and managed to work around it.

The other point that needed to be solved was the tag business. Tagging is free isn’t it? But when you want to cover a conference it is more easy to agree on a common tag so syndication of the news goes more efficiently. Where I had proposed ELAG08 already others insisted on ELAG2008, since it was used on Twitter already, whereas we could ammend the tags on blog posts and Flickr. So the tag the conference was changed to ELAG2008

Meanwhile Patrick started a hashtag page to follow the conversation on Twitter , Guus started a shared tab on Netvibes. Two interesting options to follow conference on as close as possible from a distance. Only at the end of the day I added hashtags as a follower on my Twitter, so I missed that opportunity to syndicate. Of course there was a livecast of the presentations yesterday as well. At another URL than they had promised us. The URL for the livecast for tomorrow will be http://wurtv.wur.nl/presentations/roadkit5.

The workshops were interesting I had the honour to share the moderation of the workshop with Patrick Danowski. He covered the more formal cataloging requirements whereas I tried to steer and challenge the social cataloging and tagging aspects a bit more. There are going to be another two tough sessions to get some sensible results and conclusions to report on Wednesday.

ELAG2008: Rethinking subject access

Published on April 15, 2008 in Conferences. 0 Comments

Jeroen started with a really well told parable about authoritative subjects.

He illustrates that in the semantic Web we have nearly in place has all about the relations between subjects, but that authority file on the subjects are still missing. To be honest I think I only grasp a little bit about his well told and presented story. But I need time digest this all. Or is it perhaps the end of the day calling?

ELAG2008: Rethinking cataloging

Published on April 14, 2008 in Conferences. 1 Comment

Paula Goossens expands in her talk on the future of cataloging. Library catalogs were born in the previous century. We still build on the card catalog as a heritage system. In the future controlled information will be used to make the uncontrolled data more intelligent, by which she means that authority files from the library world can be, and should be used in descriptive bibliographic data such as Amazon, LibraryThing and Google (Books).

She shows the current cataloging rules such as ISBD and AACR2 and the like, and pleads for getting rid of these old rules and create new rules ready for the 21st century.

New guidelines are for instance Statement of international cataloging principles (IFLA) or RDA (mainly from the anglosaxon world). RDA is written as web tool. She describes the slow progress that is being made, but progress nevertheless. She is positive on the future and wants the catalog to be used more intensively on the Web.

Semantic web opportunities for digital libraries

Published on April 14, 2008 in Conferences. 0 Comments

Laura Hollink  from the Free University of Amsterdam gives an introduction on the semantic Web (SW).

Two reasons for the use of semantic web techniques:

  1. Machine processable representation of semantic information. Your search engine can reason with the knowledge stored in the the thesaurus.
  2. Interoperability, link your collection to other collections and let other people/institutions link to your collection and thus enable cross-collection access.

After explaining the building blocks of SW she highlights the SW for libraries and Archives. The standard language for LIS is SKOS.  After touching the interoperability challenge, she goes on to highlight some excellent examples of vocabularies available. Union list of artist names, Wordnet, Thesaurus of Geographical Names (TGN).

There follows an example to search collections with different vocabularies making use alignment between thesauri.  The examples she is showing come from the e-culture demonstrator.  She shows also and exaple in which two pictures are linked to each other  based on Semantic Web Rules. How a picture of van Gogh and Gaugin are related to each other. Works in some instances, but not always. Really experimental.

At the end she mentions briefly that these project are in some instances hampered by copyrights as well.

The Wageningen Library Content Management System

Published on April 14, 2008 in Conferences. 0 Comments

Peter starts his presentation on the current Libaray Content Management System, with a look back at the early days when we built the first LCMS based on Minisys. He showed some screenshots from the Internet Archive from our Library Website.

The next step is the defence, why did we built our own library cintent management system. The reason is mainly, that it offers us flexibility at the moment, and in the near future. Library systems from vendors always need a lot of adapting new applications are needed all the time, new functionalities are always on our wish list. Building our own content management systems allows us do to exactly that.

The core of our LCMS is the inhouse developed language WebQuery, which overlays an Oracle database. The output in the form of XML schema’s is translated with XSLT stylesheets in HTML pages. For the updated routines of the Oracle database our programmers also developed a xForms like language.

Peter gives some examples of URL manipulation that shows the different functionalities of the library system. Even some journals are archived in this way on our system. Similarly, this approach is being followed for the subject pages of library resources and the news database for library news. The systems is very flexible: eg, we can integrate the library holdings in the SFX windows or the document ordering requests. In the library book ordering systems, our service orietned architecture integrates elements from the book supplier or fill out as much as possible based on an ISBN with information from Amazon.

The pro’s are numerous. Flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in. The disadvantge of course is the quite large share of IT staff you need to attract for these ambitious projects and to keep the staff interested in their works.

Tagging, social bookmarking, folksonomies, reference management, LibraryThing and the Library

Published on April 14, 2008 in Conferences. 1 Comment

Tomorrow the 32nd ELAG symposium starts. The ELAG symposiums are special in the way that workshop around pre-selected subject form the mainstay of the conference. So they told me. The workshops not the ordinary workshop, where you passively attend to learn something. The idea behind these workshops is that the participants brainstorm over a subject, perhaps that the workshop leader knows some more of the background of the subject, but the workshop itself is a true group exercise.

I was asked to moderate the workshop of social-tagging. Until now the distribution of articpants over the workshop is a bit uneven, so I need to sell my workshop on “social tagging” tomorrow in a sales pitch to the attendents of the symposium. So what will I tell them?

The title of the workshop Social tagging is a combination of two terms, tagging and social bookmarking. At first sight they don’t seem to be the most spectacular subjects to ponder over in the ELAG workshops. But when the constituency of your library is adding tags to all kind of video’s, photographs and websites, wouldn’t you at least not give them the possibility to tag you library resources as well? Is it already possible in your library OPAC? Well, what about the bibliographic databases that your library licences, why can’t users tag those items yet? If they are tagging ‘your’ resources already the obvious questions to ask are, which items are they tagging and what tags are they using. What can we learn from our users.

Can we use those tags from to improve the recall and ranking from our library systems? How should these folksonomies be combined, enhanced, complemented with our formal taxonomies?

If your users can tag any item on your library system, where should the tags and tagged items be collected. Should it be a homegrown system like they have developed at Pennsylvania University Library (Penntags), Harvard Law Library (H2O) or recently at Michigan (MTagger), should we advise to use the tools developed by the big scientific publishers such as 2Collab from Elsevier, Connotea from Nature or Scholar from Blackboard? Or should our academics and their precious labour on tagging be shared on common bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl and the like. Is CiteUlike perhaps the best solution after all?

When it comes to saving library items we supported already reference management programmes such as EndNote and Refworks. What is the relations between social bookmarking sites and the very popular reference management programmes. RefWorks is much better than EndNote at handeling websites, but they haven’t been developed as social bookmarking sites yet. On the other hand, Connotea and 2Collab are social bookmarking sites that have some, reference management capacity but they don’t stand up in the competition to EndNote en Refworks in this respect.

LibraryThing is perhaps an odd case in this workshop, but has some very intriguing features. Some libraries are already using the tags and recommendations from LibraryThing in their catalog. Interesting, I am not aware of an example where items tagged in a library catalog and those tags being used to enrich LibraryThing. Perhaps it exists already. I don’t know yet. LT is to some extend a special case of a reference management software. It is only used for books. An awfull lot of books. It is therefore quite easy to add your own books to LibraryThing. At our university we are all the time confronted with organically grown collections of books that are not part of the library collection. Consider the idea that those collections of books were entered in LibraryThing, that we could use the collected LibraryThings from our constituency to see if a book we don’t have in our collection is somewhere on campus, rather than rushing to the order book button. LibrarThing from our trusted users as a natural extension of our catalog and library collection?

Those are the five lines along which I hope to ponder the theme of this workshop with a group of smart library people over the next three days. Lorcan Dempsey wrote recently on this subject as a new bibliographic tissue.

This new bibliographic tissue is really hot ladies and gentleman, please come and exchange your ideas with me in this workshop.