Jessie M.N. Hey

e‐Science and its implications for the library community

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explain the nature of the “e‐Science’ revolution in twenty‐first century scientific research and its consequences for the library community.Design/methodology/approach – The concepts of e‐Science are illustrated by a discussion of the CombeChem, eBank and SmartTea projects. The issue of open access is then discussed with reference to arXiv, PubMed Central and EPrints. The challenges these trends present to the library community are discussed in the context of the TARDis project and the University of Southampton Research Repository.Findings – Increasingly academics will need to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams distributed across several sites in order to address the next generation of scientific problems. In addition, new high‐throughput devices, high‐resolution surveys and sensor networks will result in an increase in scientific data collected by several orders of magnitude. To analyze, federate and mine this data will require collaboration between scienti...

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources

It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilitate such beneficial activity, but the take-up has been disappointingly small, particularly in University and Higher Education, which is the subject of this research. The problem has been that practitioners have not deposited their teaching resources, or have not made them openly available, in the quantity that would achieve critical mass for uptake. EdShare and the Language Box are two initiatives that have concentrated on the issue of facilitating and improving the practice of sharing, the former in an institutional setting and the latter in a subject community of practice. This paper describes and analyzes the motivations for these projects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes, in practice, that have so far been observed. The contribution of this paper is an improved understanding of how to encourage educational communities to share.

Citation linking: improving access to online journals

The most innovative online journals are maturing rapidly and distinctive new features are emerging. Foremost among these features is the hypertext link, popularised by the World Wide Web and which will form the basis of a new, highly integrated scholarly literature. Journal integration in this instance seeks to recognise, extend and exploit relationships at the level of journal content-the papers-while maintaining some of the familiar contexts, in some cases journal identities, that define the content hierarchy and inform decision-making by readers. Links are a powerful tool for journal integration, most immediately in the form of citation linking. The paper reviews examples of citation linking in practice, and describes a new system, a link service, which is being developed to support novel and flexible linking mechanisms on the Web. One application of this link service is the Open Journal project, which is working with journal publishers to investigate the most effective ways of applying these powerful link types to enhance online journals.

PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services

To date many institutional repository (IR) software suppliers have pushed the IR as a digital preservation solution. We argue that the digital preservation of objects in IRs may better be achieved through the use of light-weight, add-on services. We present such a service – PRONOM-ROAR – that generates file format profiles for IRs. This demonstrates the potential of using third- party services to provide preservation expertise to IR managers by making use of existing machine interfaces to IRs.

Repositories for research: Southampton’s evolving role in the knowledge cycle

Purpose – To provide an overview of how open access (OA) repositories have grown to take a premier place in the e‐research knowledge cycle and offer Southamptons route from project to sustainable institutional repository.Design/methodology/approach – The evolution of institutional repositories and OA is outlined raising questions of multiplicity of repository choice for the researcher. A case study of the University of Southampton research repository (e‐Prints Soton) route to sustainability is explored with a description of a new project that will contribute to e‐research by linking text and data.Findings – A model for IR sustainability.Originality/value – The TARDis project was one of the first IRs to achieve central university funding in the UK. Combined with increased visibility and citation, the research assessment exercise route has become the “hook” on which a number of IRs are basing their business models.

Agent Technology concepts in a heterogeneous distributed searching environment

Hybrid libraries provide multiple ways to access information in various formats, normally within a common information framework. The eLib project MALIBU (MAnaging the Hybrid LIbrary for the Benefit of Users) focuses on the development of models, both prototypic and theoretic, for management and organisation of the hybrid library. This article describes the agent technology used for the MALIBU prototype search engine that allows for the search and retrieval of information from disparate resources.