Open Access Metadata for Journals in Directory of Open Access Journals: Who, How, and What Scheme?

Open access (OA) is a form of publication that allows some level of free access to scholarly publications. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a repository to which OA journals may apply and upload content to increase discoverability. OA also refers to metadata that is freely available for harvesting. In making metadata open access, standards for schemes and protocols are needed to facilitate interoperability. For open access journals, such as those listed in the DOAJ, providing open access metadata in a form that promotes interoperability is essential for discoverability of their content. This paper investigates what standards exist or are emerging, who within journals is creating the metadata for DOAJ journals, and how are those journals and DOAJ sharing the metadata for articles. Moreover, since creating metadata requires specialized knowledge of both librarians and programmers, it is imperative that journals wanting to publish with OA metadata formulate plans to coordinate these experts and to be sure their efforts are compatible with current standards and protocols

The NIF LinkOut Broker: A Web Resource to Facilitate Federated Data Integration using NCBI Identifiers

This paper describes the NIF LinkOut Broker (NLB) that has been built as part of the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) project. The NLB is designed to coordinate the assembly of links to neuroscience information items (e.g., experimental data, knowledge bases, and software tools) that are (1) accessible via the Web, and (2) related to entries in the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI’s) Entrez system. The NLB collects these links from each resource and passes them to the NCBI which incorporates them into its Entrez LinkOut service. In this way, an Entrez user looking at a specific Entrez entry can LinkOut directly to related neuroscience information. The information stored in the NLB can also be utilized in other ways. A second approach, which is operational on a pilot basis, is for the NLB Web server to create dynamically its own Web page of LinkOut links for each NCBI identifier in the NLB database. This approach can allow other resources (in addition to the NCBI Entrez) to LinkOut to related neuroscience information. The paper describes the current NLB system and discusses certain design issues that arose during its implementation

Proposal for an IMLS Collection Registry and Metadata Repository

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes to design, implement, and research a collection-level registry and item-level metadata repository service that will aggregate information about digital collections and items of digital content created using funds from Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grants. This work will be a collaboration by the University Library and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. All extant digital collections initiated or augmented under IMLS aegis from 1998 through September 30, 2005 will be included in the proposed collection registry. Item-level metadata will be harvested from collections making such content available using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH). As part of this work, project personnel, in cooperation with IMLS staff and grantees, will define and document appropriate metadata schemas, help create and maintain collection-level metadata records, assist in implementing OAI compliant metadata provider services for dissemination of item-level metadata records, and research potential benefits and issues associated with these activities. The immediate outcomes of this work will be the practical demonstration of technologies that have the potential to enhance the visibility of IMLS funded online exhibits and digital library collections and improve discoverability of items contained in these resources. Experience gained and research conducted during this project will make clearer both the costs and the potential benefits associated with such services. Metadata provider and harvesting service implementations will be appropriately instrumented (e.g., customized anonymous transaction logs, online questionnaires for targeted user groups, performance monitors). At the conclusion of this project we will submit a final report that discusses tasks performed and lessons learned, presents business plans for sustaining registry and repository services, enumerates and summarizes potential benefits of these services, and makes recommendations regarding future implementations of these and related intermediary and end user interoperability services by IMLS projects.unpublishednot peer reviewe

STARGATE : Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit. Final Project Report

STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit) was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is intended to demonstrate the ease of use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) Static Repository technology, and the potential benefits offered to publishers in making their metadata available in this way This technology offers a simpler method of participating in many information discovery services than creating fully-fledged OAI-compliant repositories. It does this by allowing the infrastructure and technical support required to participate in OAI-based services to be shifted from the data provider (the journal) to a third party and allows a single third party gateway provider to provide intermediation for many data providers (journals). Specifically, STARGATE has created a series of Static Repositories of publisher metadata provided by a selection of Library and Information Science journals. It has demonstrated the interoperability of these repositories by exposing their metadata via a Static Repository Gateway for harvesting and cross-searching by external service providers. The project has conducted a critical evaluation of the Static Repository approach in conjunction with the participating publishers and service providers. The technology works. The project has demonstrated that Static Repositories are easy to create and that the differences between fully-fledged and static OAI Repositories have no impact on the participation of small journal publishers in OAI-based services. The problems for a service that arise out of the use of Static Repositories are parallel to those created by any other repository dealing with journal articles. Problems arise from the diversity of metadata element sets provided by a given journal and the lack of specific metadata elements for the articles' volume and issue details. Another issue for the use of publishers' metadata arise as the collection policies of some existing services only allow Open Access materials to be included in them. The project recommends that the use of Static Repositories continues to be explored - in particular as a flexible way to expose existing sets of structured information to OAI services and to create the opportunity to enhance the metadata as part of the process. The project further recommends that the publishing community consider the creation or adoption of an application profile for journal articles to support information discovery that can search by volume and issue. Significant further use of the Static Repository technology by small journal publishers will require the future creation and maintenance of a community-specific Static Repository Gateway. Further use will also require advocacy within the publishing community but might initially be most effectively kick-started through the creation of OAI repositories based on metadata held by the commercial services which publish or mediate access to electronic copies of journals on behalf of small publishers

Integration of environmental data in BIM tool & linked building data

Environmental assessment is a critical need to ensure building sustainability. In order to enhance the sustainability of building, involved actors should be able to access and share not only information about the building but also data about products and especially their environmental assessment. Among several approaches that have been proposed to achieve that, semantic web technologies stand out from the crowd by their capabilities to share data and enhance interoperability in between the most heterogeneous systems. This paper presents the implementation of a method in which semantic web technologies and particularly Linked Data have been combined with Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools to foster building sustainability by introducing products with their environmental assessment in building data during the modelling phase. Based on Linked Building Data (LBD) vocabularies and environmental data, several ontologies have been generated in order to make both of them available as Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs. A database access plugin has been developed and installed in a BIM tool. In that way, the LBD generated from the BIM tool contains, for each product a reference to its environmental assessment which is contained in a triplestore

CC-interop : COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation. Final Project Report

As far as is known, CC-interop was the first project of its kind anywhere in the world and still is. Its basic aim was to test the feasibility of cross-searching between physical and virtual union catalogues, using COPAC and the three functioning "clumps" or virtual union catalogues (CAIRNS, InforM25, and RIDING), all funded or part-funded by JISC in recent years. The key issues investigated were technical interoperability of catalogues, use of collection level descriptions to search union catalogues dynamically, quality of standards in cataloguing and indexing practices, and usability of union catalogues for real users. The conclusions of the project were expected to, and indeed do, contribute to the development of the JISC Information Environment and to the ongoing debate as to the feasibility and desirability of creating a national UK catalogue. They also inhabit the territory of collection level descriptions (CLDs) and the wider services of JISC's Information Environment Services Registry (IESR). The results of this project will also have applicability for the common information environment, particularly through the landscaping work done via SCONE/CAIRNS. This work is relevant not just to HE and not just to digital materials, but encompasses other sectors and domains and caters for print resources as well. Key findings are thematically grouped as follows: System performance when inter-linking COPAC and the Z39.50 clumps. The various individual Z39.50 configurations permit technical interoperability relatively easily but only limited semantic interoperability is possible. Disparate cataloguing and indexing practices are an impairment to semantic interoperability, not just for catalogues but also for CLDs and descriptions of services (like those constituting JISC's IESR). Creating dynamic landscaping through CLDs: routines can be written to allow collection description databases to be output in formats that other UK users of CLDs, including developers of the JISC information environment. Searching a distributed (virtual) catalogue or clump via Z39.50: use of Z39.50 to Z39.50 middleware permits a distributed catalogue to be searched via Z39.50 from such disparate user services as another virtual union catalogue or clump, a physical union catalogue like COPAC, an individual Z client and other IE services. The breakthrough in this Z39.50 to Z39.50 conundrum came with the discovery that the JISC-funded JAFER software (a result of the 5/99 programme) meets many of the requirements and can be used by the current clumps services. It is technically possible for the user to select all or a sub-set of available end destination Z39.50 servers (we call this "landscaping") within this middleware. Comparing results processing between COPAC and clumps. Most distributed services (clumps) do not bring back complete results sets from associated Z servers (in order to save time for users). COPAC on-the-fly routines could feasibly be applied to the clumps services. An automated search set up to repeat its query of 17 catalogues in a clump (InforM25) hourly over nearly 3 months returned surprisingly good results; for example, over 90% of responses were received in less than one second, and no servers showed slower response times in periods of traditionally heavy OPAC use (mid-morning to early evening). User behaviour when cross-searching catalogues: the importance to users of a number of on-screen features, including the ability to refine a search and clear indication that a search is processing. The importance to users of information about the availability of an item as well as the holdings data. The impact of search tools such as Google and Amazon on user behaviour and the expectations of more information than is normally available from a library catalogue. The distrust of some librarians interviewed of the data sources in virtual union catalogues, thinking that there was not true interoperability