Belated Access 2006 notes: Saturday, Oct. 14th

Consortium update

ASIN, Slavko Manojlovich

ASIN Overview

• 17 atlantic academic libraries
• 300 - 18,000 students
• 2 unilingual francophone sites
• Sirsi, Ex Libris, and Innovative

Why our users hate us

• choose format over subject
• learn multiple database interfaces
• citations presented in confusing formats

Addressing the problems

• a la carte user authentication
• EZProxy servers
• SingleSearch federated search tool over 400 resources (including 100+ open access)
• 1Cate OpenURL resolvers
• Relais ILL
• Refwork/Refshare

Principles

• Click, don't type
• when you have it, show it
• when you don't have it, make it easy to get
• focus on appropriate links rather than click counts
• let the user determine the appropriate copy from the available formats

Stephen Sloan

• Missing ingredient -- enabling subject choice for users, rather than format
• working with SirsiDynix on a consortium version of EPS Rooms CMS
• production version to be available in 1st quarter of 2007
• Rooms is basically a portal environment, with different defaults/scoping for each subject (so that single search

Outstanding challenges

• Federated search connectors based on screen scraping will break
• Citations from certain resources cannot be linked to Resolver
• Cookie pushing in a public environment
• Implementation of the NISO Metasearch standard to improve federated searching

Recognizing our differences

• Local customization of interfaces
• Emulating local default search options--everyone use EBSCO, but everyone has configured different behaviour
• Relying on local expertise at each site

COPPUL, Carmen Kazakoff-Lane

COPPUL Overview

• ANTS: Using Open Source, Social Software (in the COPPUL consortium)
• sharing and updating animated tutorials that were believed to be a better option than long information literacy tutorials
• make it easy to locate and use these tutorials (central location and explicit copyright / reuse statement)
• Make sharing easy and desirable through quality standards, help, and the allowance for local customization

How does it work?

• Project is hosted at http://brandonu.ca/Library/coppul
• ask each institution to take responsibility for a certain set of databases so that they can be updated along with the user interface
• wiki enables institutions to update database list with status of development, whenever they create a tutorial, or add a new database to the list
• rss feeds enable you to track which tutorials have been updated or created
• tutorials are housed within a single institutional repository, licensed under CC licenses with options to the creators
• Other organizations (like LU) are welcome to participate!

Guy Teasdale, Laval Universite

Quebec Digital Infrastructure: The Year in Review

Main players

• BAnQ - Bibliotheque et archives nationales du Quebec
• CREPUQ - Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities
• Erudit
• Museums
• Quebec Gov.
• SRC and other media

BAnQ

• BNQ started in 1967
• April 2005, opening of la Grande Bibliotheque of the BNQ
• Jan 2006 - Merger of ANQ and BNQ; mandate to acquire and disseminate collections
• October 2006 - Second meeting on digital national library
• 1996 - beginning of digitization activities
• 2003 - permanent digitation program
• 3.2 million pages of digital materials (newspapers, etc) currently in the collection; 62000 images

Meanwhile in the World

• Dec 2004 - Google print project: 15 M ebooks by 2010
• Jan 2005 - CEO of BND Jeanneney react in Le Monde "Quand Google defie l'Europe", results in the proposal for the Creation of European Digital Library
• 2010 European DL expect 6M books
• Fevrier 2006 Franco network of digital libraries was formed (including France and Quebec)

Meanwhile in Canada

• Quebec is participating in Alouette Canada, hoping that nobody is reinventing the wheel

Erudit

• 18000 scholarly articles from 48 journals
• 150000 backfiles projected
• Erudit schema adopted by www.persee.fr and www.cens.cnrs.fr = franc interoperability
• $3,000 annually to join

OCLC, Thom Hickey

Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)

• Link national authority records
• Build on their authority work
• Move towards universal bibliographic control, while allowing local variations to exist
• Deutsche Nationalbiblithek, LoC, and OCLC -- hoping for the BNF (French) national file
• OCLC is responsible for the actual coding for the project

Matching variations

• In the LCNAF and PND authority files:
  • Same name, same person
  • Same name, different people
  • Different names, same person
  • Missing person in one file

Enhancing the authorities

• Bibliographic record -> Derived authority -> Enhanced authority
• Authority record -> Enhanced authority

Weaker attributes

• Only one of birth/death dates
• Subject area of works
• Format
• Language
• Publisher
• Partial title match

Even weaker attributes

• Date of publication
• Country
• Role
• Format

Compute it

• Standard approach:
  • Generate keys and data
  • Load information into a database
  • Index it
  • Extract fields needed
• Map/reduce approach (adopted from Google)
  • Split the database up
  • Run parallel jobs against those pieces of the database
  • Bring information together through map/reduce

Map/Reduce

• Map
  • Read in source file (e.g MARC21)
  • Write out key + data
• Reduce
  • Read in array of data for each unique key
  • Write out key + data

Map/Reduce implementation

• Written in Python
• Uses ssh and XML-RPC for control and communication
• Map/Reduce seems to add around 10% overhead
• Earlier implementation ran on a 48 CPU cluster
• Current VIAF cluster is a 12 CPU cluster on 4 nodes
• Running Linux and 64-bit Python (no need to worry about 2GB memory limit)

VIAF matching code

• 17 modules
• 1,100 lines of code
• 600 lines of configu