Gordon Dunsire

Collecting metadata from institutional repositories

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to review metadata issues identified in recent research carried out in Scotland on services based on metadata aggregation via OAI‐PMH, and to examine the role of collection‐level description in managing ingest to harvested repositories, subsequent harvesting by secondary aggregators, and the contextualisation of institutional and aggregated repositories in the wider information retrieval environment.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews the output of several projects involving institutional repositories and collection‐level description in Scotland.Findings – Collection‐level description is a useful tool for aggregator services, but further work is required to accommodate information about the manipulation of metadata sets. Communities need to consider how best to incorporate structured collection information within the OAI‐PMH for their specific purposes.Originality/value – The paper shows the importance of recent developments in collection description me...

Clumps and collection description in the information environment in the UK with particular reference to Scotland

The role, potential and interaction of networked catalogues and collection-level description have recently been given emphasis in order that efficient resource discovery mechanisms, and the effective organisation of such resources, be facilitated within the UKs developing JISC information environment (IE). This article describes the work of CC-interop, a JISC project, and related projects that inform the development of the IE and its ability to instantiate the functional model of online resource discovery to which JISC aspires. The article reviews the evolution of Z39.50 virtual union catalogue services and collection description services that preceded CC-interop. The paper also discusses how such work is informing regional information environments, with particular reference to Scotland, and reveals how such local arrangements will benefit the wider JISC IE.

Match Point: Duplication and the Scholarly Record: The Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS), and Its Findings on Duplication and Authority Control in OPACs and IRs

This article summarizes the methodology and findings of the Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS), a project recently carried out by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). In the context of the Online Public Access Catalogs (OPAC) and the recent development of the Institutional Repository (IR) within Higher Education Institutions in the United Kingdom, it considers issues of metadata quality, name authority control, and standardized subject headings, as well as departmental and institutional workflows. It also considers duplication and scope overlap within institutions with more than one IR.

Building a Platform to Manage RDA Vocabularies and Data for an International, Linked Data World

The management of vocabularies in the evolving linked data environment requires different tools and processes from those libraries and other memory institutions have used in the past. The RDA (Resource Description and Access) standard has taken the lead in building tools and providing services as part of its RDA Registry development. The evolution of the current RDA Registry and the Open Metadata Registry (OMR), on which the RDA Registry is built, are described, including the rationale for directions, decisions, and ongoing development.

Semantic web and linked open data

To understand the new technological environment of the Semantic Web and linked open data, and to develop bibliographic services within it, it is necessary to understand some basic concepts and terms. A practical illustration of the state of the art of information retrieval using bibliographic control that preceded the Internet is followed by a brief description of the layering of the World Wide Web on top of the Internet, and the Semantic Web on top of that. Technical concepts relevant to Universal Bibliographic Control are described and illustrated with library examples, covering: the Internet, World Wide Web and Semantic Web; Resource Description Framework, the structural foundation of the Semantic Web, the expression of metadata statements as triples, and Uniform Resource Identifiers and namespaces; mathematical graphs as representations of triples; ontologies and application profiles as ways of expressing metadata schema; the open world assumption; the importance of metadata provenance; mapping, alignment and harmonization of metadata using different schema; and linked open data and the linking data cloud.

New evidence on the interoperability of information systems within UK universities

This paper will report on the key findings and implications of the JISC-funded Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS), a 3 month project which investigated the interoperability of Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) within UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The aims and objectives of the project included: surveying the extent to which repository content is in scope for OPACs and the extent to which it is already recorded there; listing the various services to managers, researchers, teachers and learners offered by these systems; identifying the potential for improvements in the links from repositories and/or OPACs to other institutional services such as finance or research administration. The project combined quantitative and qualitative methods; primarily, an online questionnaire distributed to staff within 85 UK HEIs, purposive sampling and two in-depth case studies conducted at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow.

We are not alone but part of the linked data environment

The very essence of the concept of linked open data is that one’s local data points to other data, i.e. to external sources, and that those other data have one’s data as a target. Yet it is not enough to link within one’s community. This chapter therefore describes the processes by which the library community reaches out towards other communities, such as those of museums and archives as part of the cultural heritage sector and the publishing and rights management community. It also describes the potential of controlled vocabularies or authoritative sources of information which can be shared, reused, and function as nodes of linked data not only by libraries but also by other communities. In the final part of the chapter the impact that the users of social networks as well as machines have on generating metadata as linked open data will be discussed.

Publishing datasets as linked open data

Publishing library datasets as linked open data can be viewed as an extension of our institutional services for publishing bibliographic metadata. However, there are certain strategic decisions to be made which question such a position. In this chapter the bottom-up approach is discussed first. As ‘linked data’ by definition cannot exist on its own, the process of contextualizing local data triples is described, drawing attention to the issues involved in building relations or links between and among standards used to represent our data to allow them to interoperate, and to the stumbling blocks caused by different conceptualizations of standards and models being used. The next level of this bottom-up approach is discussed as the specification of the requirements for expressing the syntax of sets of data triples. The chapter concludes with a discussion of linked data projects and services involving bibliographic metadata, this time taking a top-down approach.

Publishing bibliographic element sets and value vocabularies

In order to publish bibliographic metadata as linked open data, it is necessary first to have the required infrastructure. This chapter describes this process and highlights problems encountered based primarily on IFLA’s work in the field. The chapter first discusses the issue of bibliographic metadata being viewed as the content of RDF triples that populate the linked open data cloud, and their possible impact in that environment. The progress of the work on representing IFLA’s standards and models in RDF is then described. An account of steps to take in transforming bibliographic standards and models, taking into account Semantic Web requirements, is presented next. The infrastructure needed to support this task, in the form of a vocabulary management system, is exemplified using the Open Metadata Registry. The multilingual and multi-script issues in representing standards in RDF are of particular interest to IFLA. The chapter concludes with a description of some of the current solutions to these problems.

Bibliographic information organization: a view from now into the past

Bibliographic information organization, in the current meaning of the term, can be traced back to the first inventories or lists or indexes of books in libraries from Sumer times, while the first attempt to produce a universal bibliography is the Bibliotheca Universalis of Konrad Gesner, published in Zurich in 1545. For centuries these two ‘products’ of the recording of libraries’ holdings (the catalogue) and of national print production (the bibliography) were treated as parallel processes, each focused on its particular function and often issued by different institutions or bodies. However, these two functions were brought together with the development and elaboration of the concept of Universal Bibliographic Control that was internationally adopted at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. The scope of such an enterprise can only be realized within an internationally collaborative environment – that of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). This chapter describes this effort and its results.