On March
27-28, 2008 NISO sponsored a conference on
Next
Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards.
See the
complete
list of speakers.
Todd Carpenter, Managing Director of NISO, kicked off the
conference and set the stage for speakers to discuss new and emerging discovery
tools we might expect in the next few years, and where the standards are- and
are not – keeping pace. The development
of knowledge bases, web systems, repositories and other sources for information
brings the need for effective discovery tools to the forefront. With new technologies we are seeing new ways
to find and share resources, from search tools to social networking and
browsing tools, and tools that combine different means of discovery into an
integrated process. He asked how NISO can help with the development of new
systems and ensure that standards will be in place where needed as development
continues?
Some highlights of day
one:.
Richard Akerman, Technology
Architect at the National Research Council, Canada Institute for Scientific and
Technical Information (NRC CISTI), Canada's National Science Library and
Publisher, gave the opening keynote: Building
SkyNet for Science: Discovering New Frontiers Using Embedded Knowledge. Some of his main points were
- Discovery in the digital environment is mediated primarily by machines. We need to produce information in formats that machines can understand, in parallel with formats that are human-readable.
- Keep it to a limited number of formats, keep them simple and enable easy interchange of information.
- Need to disambiguate names, institutions, text content, data so that machines don’t have to do a lot of work. Need to develop unique identifiers.
- Users can add value to our content, but we need to find ways to standardize this presentation to users. Standard APIs needed.
Other things he
touched on:
Robert J. Sandusky,
Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology, University of Illinois at Chicago,talked about Deep Indexing and Discovery
of Tables and Figures. Most
abstracting and indexing systems provide access to article-level metadata
(journal article title, authors’ names, text abstracts, descriptors, etc. Deep indexing refers to the capability of
discovering information at the figure or table level. Systems are available that extract, index and
support search of figures, tables, maps, and graphs.
Sandusky discussed tools such as:
Sandusky urged developers to think about metadata standards for datasets (figures, maps,
photographs, digitized specimens). Users
want to get the dataset after they see the table.
Mike Teets, VP,
OCLC Global Product Architecture, OCLC, gave an overview of data driven
services available from OCLC that try to improve users understanding of search
results. “It’s all about the data and
how the data relates to other data.” OCLC is leveraging large datasets to provide web services at machine
level for better delivery services.
· xISBN (http://www.worldcat.org/affiliate/webservices/xisbn/app.jsp)
This Web service supplies ISBNs and other
information associated with an individual work that is represented in WorldCat.
Submit an ISBN to this service, and it returns a list of related ISBNs and
selected metadata.” Uses FRBR
algorithms.
· xISSN. (http://xissn.worldcat.org/xissnadmin/index.htm)
associates different editions of same serial (such as print and online
editions) and historical relationships such as title changes, mergers, splits.
· WorldCat
Identities: http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/ This initiative
mines WorldCat for individual identities and creates a page for each...
- OCLC/Openly
OpenURL Referrer (http://www.openly.com/openurlref/ On March 12, 2006, OCLC added COinS to its Open WorldCat web pages. COinS is an acronym that stands for Context Objects in Spans, which represent a standardized way to embed citation metadata into a web page. COinS are actually included in the HTML code on the web page using OpenURLs. This allows
other processors and web browsers to find the citation metadata and generate links to other resources that are accessible via OpenURLs.
Highlights of day two:
Peter Murray, Assistant Director,
New Services Development, OhioLINK discussed the evolution of the end-user
interface to library catalogs.
Murray is also a blogger known as the Disruptive Library Technology Jester.
Murray
mentioned Marshall Breeding’s article Next
Generation Library Catalogs in July/August 2007 Library Technology Reports (http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/next-generation-library-catalogs.html
and features of these catalogs including:
· Persistent
links/Permalinks
· Faceted
browsing
· Post
search limiting
· Syndicated
service (RSS) What’s new using this search?
· Machine-generated
saved searches
· User-supplied
comments
· Social
networking tools
OPAC replacements include::
· AquaBrowser from Medialab Solutions at Queens Library in NY http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/
· Encore from Innovative Interfaces, Inc. at University of Kentucky http://ukty-mt.iii.com/iii/encore/app
· Primo from ExLibris at University of Minnesota Libraries http://prime2.oit.umn.edu:1701/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=TWINCITIES
· WorldCat Local at Ohio State http://osu.worldcat.org/
Open Source projects include:
· Blacklight at University of Virginia http://blacklight.betech.virginia.edu/
(Solr and Ruby on Rails)
· fac-back-opac at Paul Smith’s
College http://library.paulsmiths.edu/catalog
· Scriblio
http://about.scriblio.net/
at Plymouth State University
http://library.plymouth.edu/
· VuFind
http://vufind.org/ Demo site at http://vufind.org/demo/