Website van Thomas Place

http://www.library.gatech.edu/search_locate/wag_the_dog.html

Bookmarklet for Google Scholar, Scirus and Pubmed. Works also for databases with pages that contain ISBN, ISSN or DOI. Links are generated that point to the local link resolver (of Georgia Tech in this case).

See also http://dilettantes.blogspot.com/2005/04/countdown-to-wagging.html

WAG stands for Windsor-Alberta-Georgia, see http://gslocal.sourceforge.net/

http://www.endinfosys.com/usability.htm

[2006-08-21: Unfortunately the links to the site of Endeavor don’t work anymore. Usability not important anymore for Endeavor? TP]

This page contains some useful links with respect to usability. The first link on the page is to an introduction by Jakob Nielsen about the subject of usability.

In the Related Links section to the right, you will find a number of documents that describe Endeavor’s work, including a whitepaper that describes good interface design for federated searching, and a checklist on how to start usability testing at your library.

Very useful are the slides of this presentation:
Slide 12 about the value of user-centered design (Elsevier!) is very instructive. Slide 26 gives information about the equipment of the usability lab of Rochester University. Slides 31 – 33 describes the user interface of EnCompass for Journals Onsite. “Developed a user interface that supported browsing behavior of users.” Slide 32 is a screen dump of Browsing journals grouped by subject; this is relevant for our discussion about the functionality of the journal catalogue.

http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/presentations/olybris_keynote_2005.pdf

Slides (59!) of a presentation given by Herbert van de Sompel at my birthday, last monday.

See also the weblog of Lorcan Dempsey, Repositories ain’t what they used to be …

Here are some quotes.

Implications of the repository model:
Before they know it, institutions will be swamped with digital information of all kinds
Libraries seem to be the natural parties to take care of this vast growth of digital collection:
• Local repository (ies)
• Thousands of remote repositories

Characteristics & consequences of this model:
• Value chains starting in repositories
• Local capacity
• Archiving
• Rights
• Interoperability
• Standards

Value chains starting in repositories
• New knowledge is really being created when allowing for nonanticipated use of stuff.
• These repositories are not about creating services for local users (only)
• These repositories are not about creating a service (user interface) for all users
• These repositories are about facilitating the use of materials in many contexts
• These repositories are the starting point of value chains

To allow value chains to emerge on the basis of materials in repositories, those repositories need a clear/clean machine interface that allows downstream applications to consume materials, aggregate them, build services, …
⇒ Disconnection of repository content and service: allows for creation of both local and remote services
⇒ On-Web: Protocol-oriented interface
⇒ These value chains are about the real stuff not (only) about metadata

Local capacity
• Need basic infrastructure to be able to deal with digital materials of all kinds
• Infrastructure has the real stuff, not metadata at its core
• DSpace, eprints.org, Fedora, …
• Doctypes?
• Vertical application vs basic plumbing?
• Service-orientation?
• On-Web?
• Multiple repositories?
• Scale?

Rights
• Urgent need for an environment in which scholarly assets behave in a manner that matches the “gift exchange” spirit of scholarship.
• James Boyle: Think about what we loose by sticking with the current paradigm!
enormous constraints on ability to use scholarly assets:
process to extract knowledge, attach knowledge, mine,
evolve, build upon: robots are the next generation readers

Interoperability
• Use and re-use of materials in global context
o Clean/clear machine interface is not enough.
o Need cross-repository content-level interoperability
o Interoperable, global federation of repositories

Architectural issues include:
o Object representation (MPEG-21 DIDL, IMS/CP, METS, .)
o Object identification
o Object harvesting
o Object disseminations
o Object relationships
o Discovery of object repositories
o …

Standards
• Standards are the glue that holds the networked information environment together.
• Standards are crucial to facilitate the emergence of improved and integrated services across repositories.
• As the information environment becomes more complex, and as we move towards new levels of services, we will need more, not less standards.

Standards/Interoperability context
• Standardization efforts/bodies in our community are seriously challenged:
o Many standards defined outside our community.
o Lack of impact on major standardization bodies of the networked world (W3C, IETF, IANA, …)
o Problems to interconnect within and amongst related efforts in our community: digital library, grid computing, e-learning, library automation, …
o Operational models/processes not adequately adapted to the realities of the networked world (cf. patent challenges OpenURL, MetaSearch)
o Funding for standardization efforts and related infrastructure is very hard to find (cf. OAI, CIMI, info URI Registry, OpenURL Registry, …)

A content-node & service-node ecology?
• Content nodes:
o Libraries become content-nodes, capturing the intellectual output of their parent institutions and “exposing” it.
o Vision: A network of federated repositories that makes available the collective intellectual output of faculty and researchers of the world’s research institutions
o Ongoing with the Institutional Repository movement
o Libraries must act in this realm

A content-node & service-node ecology?
• Service nodes:
o Need services (value chains) to emerge on top of that content
o “If the content is on-Web, the services will bloom”
o Can not solely rely on … euh .. Google Scholar
• Service node tasks include:
– indexing, searching, recommendation, linking, datamining, visualization, … nodes
– annotation, certification, metric-collecting, rewarding, … nodes
– archiving, normalization/transformation, … nodes
• Vision: A federation of networked services – in which Libraries take on specific service tasks – that turns into a global scholarly value chain

The repository model
Physical libraries:
• Local storage of content originating with 3rd parties
• Facilitate use of that content by local user base
Current libraries:
• Remote storage of content originating with 3rd parties
• Facilitate use of that content by local user base
Repository model libraries:
• Local storage of content that originates in-house
• Facilitating its use by remote and local users by facilitating the emergence of services
Emergence of a quite fundamental new library model

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?reqidx=/cw/www/mcb/02640473/v23n1/contp1-1.htm

The Electronic Library
Volume 23 Number 1 2005
Special Issue: Electronic books

Using e-books for knowledge management 5
Philip Barker (pp. 5 – 8)
Keywords: Electronic Books; Knowledge Management
Article Type: Viewpoint

E-books in academic libraries 9
Linda Bennett; Monica Landoni (pp. 9 – 16)
Keywords: Academic Libraries; Electronic Books
Article Type: Case Study

An overview of electronic books: a bibliography 17
Chennupati K Ramaiah (pp. 17 – 44)
Keywords: Electronic Books; Bibliographies
Article Type: Literature Review

The e-book industry today: a bumpy road becomes an evolutionary path to market maturity 45
Nancy K Herther (pp. 45 – 53)
Keywords: Internet; Electronic Books; Standards
Article Type: Viewpoint

Using electronic textbooks: promoting, placing and embedding 54
Leo Appleton (pp. 54 – 63)
Keywords: Electronic Books; Resource Management; Higher Education
Article Type: Case Study

Desirable search features of web-based scholarly e-book systems 64
Shiao-Feng Su (pp. 64 – 71)
Keywords: Electronic Books; Internet; User Interfaces; Information Searches
Article Type: Viewpoint

Electronic textbooks that transform how textbooks are used 72
Ryan McFall (pp. 72 – 81)
Keywords: Electronic Books; Education
Article Type: Viewpoint

Implications for electronic publishing in libraries and information centres in Africa 82
Stella E Igun (pp. 82 – 91)
Keywords: Electronic Publishing; Books; Electronic Books; Libraries; Africa
Article Type: Research Paper

E-books in an academic library: implementation at the ETH Library, Zurich 92
Ann McLuckie (pp. 92 – 102)
Keywords: Electronic Publishing; Electronic Books; Internet; Libraries; Switzerland
Article Type: Case Study

Can electronic textbooks help children to learn? 103
Sally Maynard; Emily Cheyne (pp. 103 – 115)
Keywords: Electronic Books; Children (Age Groups); Learning
Article Type: Research Paper

Electronic books: their integration into library and information centers 116
Siriginidi Subba Rao (pp. 116 – 140)
Keywords: Electronic Books; Library and Information Networks; Cross-Functional Integration
Article Type: Technical Paper

Minor problem: my library doesn’t have a licence or subscription for this journal.

http://www.sadl.uleth.ca/greenstone3/greenstone3building.pdf

Authors: George Buchanan, David Bainbridge, Katherine Don and Ian H. Witten (Waikato University, New Zealand)

Abstract. This paper introduces a new framework for building digital library collections and contrasts it with existing systems. It describes a radical new step in the development of a widely-used open-source digital library system, Greenstone, which has evolved over many years. It is supported by a fresh implementation, which forced us to rethink the entire design rather than making incremental improvements. The redesign capitalizes on the best ideas from the existing system, which have been refined and developed to open new avenues through which users can tailor their collections. We demonstrate its flexibility by showing how digital library collections can be extended and altered to satisfy new requirements.

The home page of Greenstone 3 is http://www.greenstone.org/greenstone3.html

http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/writings/sa4rim.html

Author: Daniel Chudnov and Jeremy Frumkin
Contact: daniel dot chudnov at yale dot edu
Date: 2004-12-10 17:06:54 -0500 (Fri, 10 Dec 2004)

http://raymondyee.net/wiki/ScholarsBox

the Scholar’s Box that will enable faculty, students, and the public to create, manipulate, annotate, and share personal collections of digital cultural objects gathered from multiple digital repositories

Ideally, the Scholar’s Box would enable users to draw upon multiple sources in seamless, integrated ways regardless of underlying protocols and data/metadata encoding schemes.

The Scholar’s Box is a tool that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal and themed collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. As such, it sits at the interstices of digital libraries, educational technology, personal information spaces, and social software.