Collaboration in electronic resource provision in university libraries: SHEDL, a Scottish case study

This case study examines the growth of collaboration among Scottish higher education institutions. Following a summary of the work of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), more detailed information is provided on collaboration in the fields of acquisition, licensing, selection, and purchasing. Some of the UK background is outlined, relating to NESLi2 in particular, in order to illuminate the options within Scotland. The origins of negotiations on electronic resource provision within Scotland are described, drawing on developments in other countries including Ireland and Scandinavia. After initial setbacks, the implementation of the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL) from 2007 to 2009 is detailed. Current benefits arising from SHEDL are explained, and some possible future developments are discussed

AQL: an Alignment Based Language for Querying String Databases

AQL stands for Alignment Query Language, and it is an extension of SQL. AQL allows for declarative querying of databases containing strings of characters as entries. For instance, in applications such as genomic databases, the DNA-sequences are strings, and they need to be queried based on their structure. The LIKE-operation in SQL does not go very far. Existing systems for string databases have a very ad hoc nature, usually giving the user a set of predefined simple query forms. On the other hand, there has recently been considerable theoretical advancement in the field of string databases. Several languages have been proposed, and their expressive power is becoming illuminated. However, there has been no practical demonstration of the feasibility of these languages. In this paper we describe an implementation of Alignment Calculus, a powerful string database language based on a modal logic extension of relational calculus. The implementation yields AQL. In AQL the user can ..