Resource discovery & information
sharing: reaching the 2.0 turn
Bonaria Biancu
aka The Geek Librarian
Biblioteca di Ateneo
Università di Milano-Bicocca
Trento, ITC-IRST-SRA
21-22 Agosto 2006
Web 2.0
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October 2004 – Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web
2.0
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The web as a platform
Harnessing collective intelligence
Rich user experience
The long tail
Hackability
Perpetual beta
Architecture of participation
Granular accessibility of content
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Library 2.0
September 2005 – Michael Casey (Library Crunch)
coined the term Library 2.0 = web 2.0 concepts and
applications in the LIS realm (but there isn’t
agreement on the definition)
and also…
 Librarian 2.0 = Librarian + Web 2.0
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L2 is not just technology, it is an attitude
(nevertheless web 2.0 is a significant part of
the equation)
What – How – Why
(from a geek lib perspective)
What: ILS disaggregation, recombination and
integration [see Talis]
 How: (open code/standards +) API, Mashups [see
Programmable Web], AJAX [see OJAX],
Greasemonkey [see LibraryThing Thing], Firefox
Plugins [see Del.icio.us search plugins]…
 Why: Putting libraries out of the walled gardens
(breaking information silos)
=> remix content – foster user participation
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Early adopters: WPOPAC, Penn Tags
How L2 works in libraries
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OPAC 2.0: records tagging, RSS for search results, acquisitions and alerts,
user agents, openurl, federated search, user reviews, open search,
recommendations, communities (Googlezon model)
Subject based wikis
Bloglines trusted feeds
Library blogs
IM reference
RSS alerts for library news
Pod-video-casting guides to library services
Personal search engines for reference (Swiki, Gigablast)
Collaborative web (MySpace, Protopage, NetVibes…) for communicating with
users
OPML [see L2 ALA blog], social bookmarking [see Del.icio.us], and social
tagging [CiteULike, Flickr…] for integration with VLEs
…
Scout Portal Toolkit:
a Resource Description, Organization and
Discovery Tool
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A project funded by Mellon Foundation, builded by
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Internet Scout
Project in 2000
Now (2006) fully tested – vers. 1.4.x (1.3.1 adopted
by UNIMIB)
In Italy 4 instances: VL Cilea, AIB-DFP, FORMEZ,
UNIMIB; others coming
Abroad: lots… (National Finnish Library Science Link
House is a very good model)
Scout @ UNIMIB =
LINX – Link e strumenti X la ricerca
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System Configuration: layout, search options, users rights…
Metadata Field Editor: DCMES - ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2001,
some DC qualifiers, some fields (overlapping) IEEE LOM
Web based apps
Import/Export features
Different levels of workflow editing
Vocabulary control
UTF-8 support
User Preferences
Metadata structure
Metadata Field Editor
 Type of Fields: Text, Paragraph, Number,
Date, Flag, Controlled Name, Option,
Classification, Image
 name, type, description, default value,
qualifier, min-max value, inclusion in
advanced/keyword search and weight of the
field set by Metadata Field Editor (LINX
admin)
Resource description
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Some of the 15 DC Simple (not all publicly viewable) + dumb down
cataloging rules
Fields not implemented: alternate title, audience, rights, contributor,
source, relation, coverage, email address, dates
Mandatory fields: URL, Title, Description, Date issued, Release Flag
DCAP for UNIMIB: neither formalized nor strict (=> see values for
‘type’ field)
Titolo (i.e. DC ‘title’) => text field
Classificazione (i.e. DC ‘subject’) => Classification field: 13 Library
disciplinary areas + 2 additional about reference tools
Resource description
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Parola chiave (i.e. DC ‘subject’) => Controlled
Name field: TRT (Thesaurus Regione Toscana) + uncontrolled terms provided by catalogers
Descrizione (i.e. DC ‘description’)
=> Paragraph field: free text provided by catalogers
Autore (i.e. DC ‘creator’) => Controlled Name field
Editore (i.e. DC ‘publisher’) => Controlled Name
field
Tipo di risorsa (i.e. DC ‘type’) => Option field: only
some terms from ‘DC type vocabulary’
Resource description
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Lingua (ie. DC ‘language’) => Option field
Formato (i.e. DC ‘format’) => Option field
Data ultima modifica (i.e. DC ‘date’)
=> Date field: date of record last editing (chosen within the
‘date’ options offered by Scout => ‘date issued’, ‘date of record
creation’, ‘date record checked’ and ‘date last modified’)
URL (i.e. DC ‘identifier’) – but it may be also a DOI or a handle
or an ISBN or...
Release Flag (proprietary tag) => Flag field
ID record creator/modifier (proprietary tag) => not editable
Additional features implemented
for LINX
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Linkchecker (for each registered user/each
resource): score based on server response
Segnala una risorsa: web form for nonauthenticated users
Statistics (for each resource) => coming
soon
Features not implemented for resource
description
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DC Qualifiers
Features not implemented for resource
description
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OAI Mapping
Additional features not implemented
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Forum
Layout preferences
for users
Resource organization
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Browsing tree
Last n resources in home page
Brief and full display records
Linkable tags: ‘classificazione’, ‘parola chiave’,
‘autore’, ‘editore’, ‘tipo di risorsa’, ‘lingua’, ‘formato’
RSS
Import/Export records
(Not all fields are viewable from not authenticated
users)
Resource discovery
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Browsing tree
Simple search
Advanced search (with filtering and max-num results
option)
Cross-field search
RSS
Saved search
Mail alerts
Recommendations
Interaction with users and other L2
features
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RSS
Saved search
Mail alerts (user agent)
Recommendations
Resource comments (some HTML tags allowed)
Resource ratings
Filtering search options & customization of records display per
page
Thumbnail for book jackets, ejournal covers, website
screenshots
Admin tracking user comments
Interaction with users and other L2
features
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OAI-PMH compliance for resource harvesting
Import/Export in tab-delimited format for data echange with
RDN-like hubs
News & Forum for community building
Dynamic layout (accessibility + user preferences)
Web based configuration and management
Open Source – frequent new versions – developers all over the
world
Interoperability and open standards (XML, PHP, MySQL, Dublin
Core, OAI – o.s. required: Linux, but also tested on Windows)
Enjoying L2 - from LINX…
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Classification: factoring disciplinary areas in more specific
classes (facets?)
Clustering (grouping search results by type, format,
language…)
RSS feeds for disciplinary areas + search alerts
Get recommendations along with records, not separately
Sfx (min-opt): setting Scout as a web search option from Sfx
menu
Sfx: link to an OpenUrl generator for resource URL field
Metalib: setting Scout as a resource [see NELLI – OAI
searching via MetaIndex]
Exposing metadata for OAI harvesting
Integration with VLEs, CMSs etc.
Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS
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OPAC-related features:
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Catalogers: authority control for author, title, publisher,
classification, subject fields
Catalogers: mapping UNIMARC/DC for linking between records
(see: DC relation and source or UNIMARC 452 and 856 fields)
Sfx (max-opt): deep linking in Scout from Sfx menu
Federated search: whether by ‘web resource’ type/format or not
[see OpenWorldCat & FRBR specs]
Open search: Scout as a target [see A9]
Single sign-on both for OPAC, Metalib, Scout and… users
Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS
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Adding tags to resources for authenticated users [recallprecision]
Displaying tag cloud in homepage (personal tag cloud for
authenticated users)
‘Scout this’ bookmarklet (or right-click) to capture web
resources and their metadata: title, url, screenshot… depending
on how structured they are; classification if sharing schemes is
possible – see compliance with repositories like E-LIS in
CiteULike
‘Scout this’ for Socializer-like applications
Community features [related tags/users, ‘users that visit x also
visit y’…] to be included in Recommendations list
Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS
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Catalogers: setting back-office tools for resource discovery
(OPML, importing records from subject gateways, Del.icio.uslike ‘Links for you’…)
Catalogers: displaying entries from thesauri when
adding/editing controlled names and DC schemas and
vocabularies when adding/editing option lists [see post on TGL]
Ranking search results and =>
Sort results by relevance
File upload
Resource display à la Digg: resources that have received
highest rates go on the home page
Enjoying L2 - …to ERMS
(how to test Ajax, API, Mashups, Greasmonkey)
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Resource relations graphic display [see Grokker]
Auto-completion of search terms
Getting Amazon resource reviews
Getting Google Scholar references
Displaying tags from CiteULike or Connotea
Scraping identifiers (names, DOIs etc.) related with
Scout resources [see LIBX]
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[see Connotea requested features to get
suggestions]
Websites and articles
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Scout Portal Toolkit
LINX - Link e strumenti per la ricerca
Virtual Library Cilea
AIB-DFP
FORMEZ - Biblioteca virtuale per la Pubblica
Amministrazione
Edward Almasy et al., Software for building a full-featured
discipline-based web portal, “D-Lib Magazine”, 8 (2002), 11
Edward Almasy, The Scout Portal Toolkit: an overview, ALA
Annual Conference, Atlanta, June 13-19, 2002
Edward Almasy, Tools for creating your own resource portal:
CWIS and the Scout Portal Toolkit, “Library Trends”, 54
(2005), 4
Collaboration
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Wiki for sharing knowledge
Records exchange
Setting up a harvester (OAI, SRU/SRW…)
for searching against databases (every
instance exposing its metadata)
…
Questions?
Acknowledgements:
we are here thanks to Paolo Avesani :-)
This work is published under
CC license - Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 2.5 Italy