digital discovery access methods task force report

環太平洋數字圖書館聯盟簡稱 -- 태평양지역 전자도서관협의체 -- 環太平洋電子図書館会議

Digital Discovery Access Methods Task Force Report

PRDLA 2005 Hawaii

Arthur Chen, Luc Declerck (Chair) Xue Fangyu, Nie Hua, Emily Lin, David Palmer, Assunta Pisani, Peter Zhou


Task Force Charge

Evaluate the various technical options, identified at the Taiwan 2005 meeting, to provide patron access to PRDLA member digital resources and recommend on how to proceed.


Technical options considered

1. Non-mediated book requesting tools

2. Journal article requesting tools

3. Z39.50 Gateway tools

4. Canned Searches tools

5. Metasearch tools

6. OAI Service tools

7. SRB Data Grid

8. Google Scholar


Non-mediated book requesting tools

• Products– III’s INN-Reach– Fretwell-Downing’s VDX– SirsiDynix’s URSA

• Content– All or subset of member’s OPAC

• Examples– Circuit * San Diego– Summit * Oregon & Washington– HKALL * Hong Kong


Non-mediated book requesting tools

• Costs– Initial: High (hardware, installation, staff)– Ongoing: High (maintenance + shipping across Pacific)

• Pros– Saves staff time– Potential for large shared collections

• Cons– Potential for lost, damaged, materials


Journal article requesting tools

• Products– OCLC Worldcat, RAPID ILL (Colorado State University Libraries)

• OCLC Worldcat– High initial and ongoing records and holdings maintenance costs– High per transaction charge

• RAPID ILL – 60% cheaper, than traditional ILL (OCLC, RLIN, etc.)– Quicker, 3.4 days turnaround time borrowing– More exact, 93% fill rate– Works with or without INN-Reach system - if Inside INN-Reach, patrons can make

requests without leaving INN-Reach system– Can be used for print and e-journals, subject to license restrictions - see

Yale ILL Project Database – Examples: Elsevier e-journals

» Can send anything, must be printed first & faxed American Chemical Soc e-journals

» Can send anything, in any transmission method



• HKU’s RAPID e-journals– The Journal of histochemistry and cytochemistry– Datastream– Jstor– Business Periodicals Ondisc– Wiley Interscience– China Journal Net (CNKI)– American Chemical Society– Blackwell Publishing– Company of Biologists



• RAPID PODs (can belong to more than 1)– ARL pod (University of OR, HKU)– Katrina pod– PRDLA pod?

• Costs, each member– US $9,000 startup– US $8,000 annual maintenance

• Holdings scope– Members can choose which titles to include– Holdings statement shows which issues


Z39.50 Gateway tools

• Products– Many: III, Ex Libris, Endeavor, open source, etc.

• Content– Limited to catalog content (usually MARC)

• Benefit– Single search across all PRDLA member catalogs

• Member requirement: – Z39.50-compliant catalog

• Costs– Low (could use HKU’s installation)


Z39.50 gateway tools

• Pros– Relatively easy to set up

• Cons– Frequent incomplete results, time-outs, and

unavailable databases– Search is slow– Not well suited to the web, or heavily firewalled

environments– Not integrated with request service


Canned Searches tools

• Products– Many: Innovative, Ex Libris, Endeavor etc.

• Content– Subsets of catalogs

• Potential uses– Collection Development, Subject areas, etc.


Canned Searches tools

• Costs– Initial: Low (minimal staff effort)– Ongoing: Low

• Pros– Useful for subject librarians

• Cons– Separate searches necessary for each member

catalog


Metasearch tools

• Products– III’s MetaFind, Ex Libris’ MetaLib, Fretwell-Downing ZPortal,

etc.

• Content– Diverse content: including library catalogs, citation

databases, full-text databases, digital collections, etc.

• Benefit– Single search across everything

• Member requirements– Joint database license agreements


MetaSearch Tool

• Costs– Initial: high (labour done by vendor)– Ongoing: high (labour done by vendor)

• Pros– Simple, user-friendly interface

• Cons– Technology is immature, protocols are in a state of flux– Results are unreliable unless tool is limited to a discrete

number targets – Cannot handle special search functions on special

databases


OAI Service tools

• Products– Many: UM’s XPAT, ARC, OAIKepler, OCLC’s GWEN,

Greenstone, etc.

• Content– Local digital collections (scholarly papers, theses, images,

sound files, moving images, data files, etc.)

• Benefit– Integrated discovery and access to member’s local digital

collections


OAI-compliant PRDLA databases

• Academia Sinica– Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese

• Australian National University– Australian National University EPrints2 Archive– DSpace at The Australian National University

• The Chinese University of Hong Kong– Scholarly Information Repository

• Hong Kong Baptist University– HKBU Theses & Dissertations

• National University of Singapore– NUS Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

• Peking University– The Peking University Ancient Book Digital Library

• San Diego Supercomputer Center– National Science Digital Library

• University of California, Berkeley– Survey for California and Other Indian Languages

• University of California, San Diego– SIO Archives

• The University of Hong Kong– HKU Theses Online (HKUTO)

• University of Oregon– DSpace at the University of Oregon

• University of Washington– DSpace at The University of Washington– Structural Informatics Group, University of Washington (UW-SIG) Eprint Archive


OAI Service tools

• Costs– Initial: low (medium amount of staff labour)– Ongoing: low (modest amount of staff labour)

• Pros– Comparatively quick & easy to implement– Can be used as campus institutional repository– Can be used to expose collections to other OAI Service

Providers as well as Google, Yahoo, etc., or not– Basic building block for future union catalog or metasearch

initiatives• Cons

– None


SRB Data Grid

• Products: – SDSC’s Storage Resource Broker (SRB)

• Content: – Digital collections (scholarly papers, theses, images, sound

files,moving images, data files, etc.)

• Benefit: – Distribute storage, replication, and access to PRDLA

member digital collections

• Member requirements– SRB instance or SRB-enabled repository (i.e. DSpace,

Fedora)


SRB Data Grid

• Cost: – Initial: High (due to high technical expertise requirements)– Ongoing: Low

• Pros: – Robust solution for data replication/preservation purposes

• Cons– High technical expertise requirements


Google Scholar

• Product: – Google Scholar

• Content: – Same as metasearch options, i.e. diverse content, including library

catalogs, citation databases, fulltext databases, digital assets, etc.

• Cost: – Low (Medium)

• Methods– Google Crawler or OAI harvesting of local databases– Google indexing of OCLC Open WorldCat or other national

catalogs


Google Scholar

• Pros– Easy, familiar search interface– Promising future direction

• Cons– Member catalogs must be in OCLC Open Worldcat or other

national catalog indexed by Google– Deep linking to individual library records not always possible– Search limits by institution or consortia not yet available


Task Force Recommendations

To provide patron access to:

• Monographs – Implement a Z39.50 Gateway, & make reciprocal ILL agreements

• Journal articles (print & electronic)– Join RAPID

• Digital collections– Establish an OAI Service Provider

• Research guides on specific subjects– Use canned searches

• Everything– Work/experiment with Google Scholar


谢谢 !

Thank you !

digital discovery access methods task force report

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