A New Role of Libraries and Information Centers: Integrating Access to Distributed Electronic Publications

This contribution outlines some new challenges that are faced by libraries and information centers and that are caused by the proliferation of heterogeneous electronic publications accessible through the Internet and the WWW. Methods based on information and communication technology are developed worldwide to cope with these challenges. Some of these are presented with their advantages and disadvantages. The approaches and realizations made in the library of the organization of the authors can serve as a concrete existing example. Access to the electronic sources should ideally be offered integrated seamlessly with the more classical access to hard copy materials in the collection of the library or in collections elsewhere through interlibrary lending and document supply. Offering links that are appropriate for the local user can be achieved through an OpenURL link generator. A recent focus of attention is integration of sources to which access has been purchased by the library with electronic open access information sources that are in principle available even without the efforts of a library. These library services can provide added value in various ways, when users apply this system in their searches for information. 1 Libraries providing access to electronic publications Libraries and information centres are facing some new challenges, which are caused by the proliferation of heterogeneous electronic publications that are accessible through the Internet and the WWW (see for instance Nieuwenhuysen 2004). Some of these new sources of information are very formal and highly structured, while others hardly can be named publications, even though the information offered can be relevant. Access to these sources should ideally be offered integrated seamlessly with the more classical access to hard copy materials in the collection of the library or in collections elsewhere through interlibrary lending and document supply. Worldwide methods are developed to face the new challenges, all with advantages and disadvantages. In reality budgets and resources are limited and choices must be made. The developments in the library of the authors serve as an illustration of their views, tactics and realizations. Some years ago the main challenge faced by libraries was to adapt their collection development and other activities and services which they offered to the evolution towards more electronic publications and services that have become available. This has lead to the first, primitive so-called “hybrid” libraries. A simple way to bring users to electronic publications was -and still is -to offer links to the web sites of publishers or of intermediaries that bring together links to publishers and journals. 2 Libraries integrating access to printed and electronic publications Soon afterwards it became clear that the classical means to offer access to the collection of a library or information centre should be adapted drastically in order to enhance access to the widely dispersed and distributed electronic publications and to integrate these more tightly and transparently with the more classical hard copy collection. This is important because users are in general less interested in the technicalities of information carriers, media and systems, but more in the contents of the information sources. Methods, techniques and tools to increase integration include the following: • online accessible catalogues pointing to printed as well as electronic materials, • web sites of libraries or information centres, pointing to electronic sources or to an integrated hybrid catalogue, 7934-05_04_ID209_Nieuwen.indd 13 01-06-2005 09:54:36 14 Paul Nieuwenhuysen, Gerrit Alewaeters, Stefaan Renard Proceedings ELPUB2005 Conference on Electronic Publishing – Kath. Univ. Leuven – June 2005 • online authentication and authorization systems to allow or block access to sources and services, depending on the status of the user, • proxy servers or other methods to support access to sources and services by legitimate but remote users who are active outside of the computer network of the organization... 3 Libraries linking from secondary to primary electronic publications A library can offer links to electronic publications at various levels of granularity and specificity. From coarse to fine, the following can be mentioned: • to an external intermediate organisation that takes care of further linking, • to the various publishers, • to the various journals, • directly to journal articles The most direct, so-called “deep” linking to articles is possible when the library offers the user a secondary (bibliographic) database of journal articles, installed in such a way that a search result can then link to the corresponding full text of the article, in the ideal case, that is when deep linking is possible, when access is allowed to the user... An example of such a system has been developed in the library of the authors (see for instance Alewaeters et al., 2001). 4 Libraries providing access to appropriate information sources and services through an OpenURL link generator A step forward in comparison with the first systems described briefly above came with (hyper)link generators systems that are based on a knowledge base about the sources and services that can be offered by the organization’s library, so that they can offer the most relevant links from a particular starting point (for instance to bring the user from a brief but interesting bibliographic description of a journal article to the full-text). These systems are not based anymore on fixed, static URL’s in a database, but on the OpenURL that is resolved to a more specific and concrete URL that is adapted better to the specific user and his/her organisation/environment. More information about OpenURL link generators can be found for instance in Ferguson and Grogg (2004) and McDonald and Van de Velde (2004). The OpenURL standard has been published by NISO and has been submitted to ANSI for approval (NISO, 2004). local OpenURL link resolver + target link generator local OpenURL link resolver + target link generator TARGET database or service TARGET database or service 6. finally: document or service offered 3. selected OpenURL link 5. choice from menu, with URL for deep linking into database user J user 1. search-interactions that lead to 1 selection 4. appropriate menu SOURCE that offers OpenURLs (Example: article database) SOURCE that offers OpenURLs (Example: article database) OpenURL link resolver knowledgebase OpenURL link resolver knowledgebase 2. description of information item, with OpenURL (Example: title of a specific journal article) Figure 1: General scheme of linking from a source that is OpenURL compliant to possible appropriate targets through the Internet. 7934-05_04_ID209_Nieuwen.indd 14 01-06-2005 09:54:38 A new role of libraries and information centers 15 Proceedings ELPUB2005 Conference on Electronic Publishing – Kath. Univ. Leuven – June 2005 The figures illustrate the function of a link resolving system and of the menu of appropriate links that is offered by such a system to the user. The example is taken from the system that has been developed in the organisation to the authors (Alewaeters and Renard, 2003). Menu of possible targets to choose from. For this particular type of source --the grayed out targets are not relevant or available --the intense targets are probably relevant. Bibliographic description of a journal article (= source) Figure 2: An example of a menu offered by a particular link resolving system in a particular library, offering choices adapted to the particular starting source and to the local environment. Federated searching systems, also named meta-searching systems, can even allow searching through several databases in one search action. Advantages for the user are simplicity and speed. However, such a system can never be ideal as the target databases have normally not been designed to be used through such a system, so that they cannot be exploited efficiently through federated searching and so that integrating the search results from the various databases is not straightforward. Anyway, the results of a federated search action are offered ideally also in the form of OpenURL linking so that the advantages of a link resolving system can be exploited afterwards. In view of the limitations and costs of the present systems for federated searching, this approach has not (yet) been taken in the library of the authors. Furthermore, the tools mentioned above should also be integrated as nicely as possible into one simple interface that is offered to the users, together with online help and guides. 5 Libraries integrating access to fee-based and open access electronic publications Nowadays the collection of many libraries does consist of documents in hard copy as well as in electronic format, both primary (full-text) as well as secondary (bibliographic) information sources. As a recent evolution, efforts are made to integrate --on the one hand-the access to this costly library collection with --on the other hand-the access to information that is freely available through the Internet and the WWW, in order to enhance the value of the whole library information system and user experience. This is accomplished by the implementation of an OpenURL link resolving system and by feeding the knowledge base of this generator with information about relevant, present day information resources that are freely accessible through the Internet and the WWW. The following are some examples. 7934-05_04_ID209_Nieuwen.indd 15 01-06-2005 09:54:39 16 Paul Nieuwenhuysen, Gerrit Alewaeters, Stefaan Renard Proceedings ELPUB2005 Conference on Electronic Publishing – Kath. Univ. Leuven – June 2005 5.1 Incorporating open access scholarly journals in the local library knowledgebase The local library database of electronic journals forms a part of the knowledgebase that supports the link resolving system and this database can be enlarged and enriched with information about the increasing number of scholarly electronic journals that are accessible free of charge. This can be accomplished in an automated way, by computer-supported harvesting of the Directory of Open Access Journals; this is highly structured database that is available free of charge itself as an open access resource. 5.2 Deep linking from a book title to more information about the book The description of a classical book in the traditional catalogue of the library can be enriched by linking this with more information concerning this book, which is made available by bookshops through the Internet and the WWW, such as the table of contents, a summary, reviews, related book titles, pictures of the book cover... It required some research to find out the advantages and disadvantages of the numerous databases that offer interesting information about books (Somers and Nieuwenhuysen, 2003, 2004). The online shop Amazon allows fast deep linking and offers interesting information. Furthermore, evolution is fast in this domain; for instance, some providers of secondary information like Amazon and Google have started to make the contents of a selected, limited number of books full-text searchable. 5.3 Deep linking from a journal article title to an open access bibliographic database Analogous to the linking described for books, also many journal articles titles (bibliographic descriptions) can be linked to a journal article database that can provide more information about this journal article, such as subject descriptors and a summary. A famous example is the great bibliographic database for the literature in medicine and life sciences, that comes in various versions named Medline, PubMed, Entrez. 5.4 Deep linking from an article title to selected WWW search engines The description of a journal article that is found by a user and that is considered as interesting, but which is not available in full text directly through the more “normal”, well-structured deep linking system offered by the library, can be transferred directly in the form of a query to a freely accessible WWW search engine, hoping quite reasonably that the full text can be located in this way. Interesting search engines nowadays include the following: the general Google or Yahoo web search systems that offer a high coverage, fast response, and efficient ranking systems, or Scirus or Google Scholar that are specialized in academic, scientific, scholarly information sources. This approach is successful in many cases as more and more publications are made available also freely through the WWW on institutional or personal WWW sites. Figure 3 illustrates the outcome of direct deep linking to such an open access database. 7934-05_04_ID209_Nieuwen.indd 16 01-06-2005 09:54:39 A new role of libraries and information centers 17 Proceedings ELPUB2005 Conference on Electronic Publishing – Kath. Univ. Leuven – June 2005 Link to citing sources, as known by Google Scholar Related conference presentation, available for all free of charge Figure 3: An example of the results obtained from an open access secondary source (in this case Google Scholar in beta version) when it was selected form the menu offered by the link generator shown in the previous figure. 5.5 Deep linking from an article title to a database of article citations Besides deep linking from an article title to one of the selected WWW search engines as mentioned above, deep linking from an article type to the specialised WWW search engine Google Scholar can bring the user to the number of citations received by that article, as discovered by Google Scholar. This number of citations shown in the user interface is further linked to the citing documents so that the user can explore these. At the time of this work, Google Scholar is still in beta version and its database is growing. This forms an open access system similar to fee-based, commercial general bibliographic databases that offer also information about received citations, like for instance the well-established and popular Web of Science from ISI Thompson and the new, challenging Scopus by Elsevier. The figure shown above to illustrate deep linking from an article title to a WWW search engine is in fact an illustration of deep linking into Google Scholar, so that it serves also as an illustration of this kind of open access citation searching. 5.6 Deep linking not only TO but also FROM open access information sources Besides offering deep linking TO open access targets, libraries can even co-operate with open access sources, so that OpenURL links in the results from such a source can link the user to other sources, again open access or licences by the library. In this way “the circle is closed”. Examples are open archives repositories, the bibliographic database for medicine named PubMed, and Google Scholar still in beta version these days, which allows experimenting with some limited OpenURL links in co-operation with several libraries, including the one where the authors are active. 7934-05_04_ID209_Nieuwen.indd 17 01-06-2005 09:54:40 18 Paul Nieuwenhuysen, Gerrit Alewaeters, Stefaan Renard Proceedings ELPUB2005 Conference on Electronic Publishing – Kath. Univ. Leuven – June 2005 6 Concluding remarks The various ways to incorporate the open access information sources in the collection and services of the library have all been implemented in the library of the authors; see for instance http://biblio.vub.ac.be/vlink/HELP/help-frame_en.htm A difficulty with all these contemporary hybrid library methods and efforts is that the electronic information landscape changes fast, so that complete automation by some system librarian is not sufficient to keep the system running in an optimal way. The knowledge-base should be kept-up-to-date not only in an automatic way, but also with intellectual, manual input and adaptations to the changing reality. More efforts and better tools require substantial investments, while the concrete visibility of the library may even decrease. This paradoxical situation can then lead to yet another challenge for the management of such a well-evolved library or information centre: who wants to pay for an invisible library and invisible librarians?