Research Advisory Committee
Minutes -- Meeting of March 21-22, 2002
Reported by Robert C. Bolander
Communications & Programs Manager
OCLC Office of Research
Index
The OCLC Research Advisory Committee (RAC) convened its first meeting of the 2002 year on March 21-22, 2002 at the OCLC campus in Dublin, Ohio. Four RAC members were present:
- Neil McLean, Pro Vice-Chancellor, eLearning & Information Services, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) and Director of IMS Australia
- Bruce Morton, Dean of Libraries at Montana State University (Bozeman)
- Pat Pitkin, Director of Libraries at Rochester Institute of Technology, representing the OCLC Members Council Research Interest Group
- Barbara B. Tillett, Chief, Cataloging Policy & Support Office, The Library of Congress.
Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Research, opened the two-day RAC meeting with a brief overview of project management activities of the Office of Research (OR).
- The entire OR staff was involved in project-management training and had input into the development of a new research project life cycle.
- A methodology for project selection, project management, review, transition, have been developed.
- Research projects will be examined in light of thirteen criteria falling along two dimensions of relevancy and priority.
- The selection process currently is being tested.
- The project management methodology involves some standard techniques for planning the various phases of a project, from project initiation, through execution.
- Successful proposals will be reviewed periodically to determine continuance or closure.
Mr. Dempsey also presented a proposed Metadata Switch project, which would investigate the development of a set of services to add value to metadata by leveraging OCLC expertise and positioning within the community.
The Metadata Switch proposal recognizes that major digital initiatives are underway as part of learning, research, and cultural engagement. These represent the management and disclosure of institutional assets in a context in which unique, non-published materials are growing in importance.
The project will explore the infrastructure necessary for OCLC to leverage its expertise and position to add value to metadata created elsewhere by aggregating such metadata for reuse, leveraging knowledge structures, and developing services on enhanced metadata.
Components of the global system include:
- independently developed and maintained databases with harvestable metadata
- a registry of participating source databases
- accessible services for knowledge organization
- harvesting and redeployment mechanisms
- the organizational capability for enriching harvested metadata.
Diane Vizine-Goetz, Consulting Research Scientist, reported on internal and external projects using the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). She also reported on a new project to provide terminology services in the form of Web services for a range of terminology resources.
OCLC researchers and Dewey editorial staff have recently collaborated to provide high-level mappings between the outline to the Library of Congress (LC) Classification scheme and the DDC. These mappings are intended for use in QuestionPoint, a collaborative reference service that is being developed cooperatively by OCLC and the Library of Congress. The mappings will be used by participating Dewey libraries to profile their subject strengths.
Dr. Vizine-Goetz also reported on how the DDC is being used in research projects conducted by external partners. In the Renardus project, a collaborative effort involving several European subject gateways, the DDC is being used to provide a common browsing structure and switching language for the different subject vocabularies used by the project partners. The DDC is also to be used in the e-Prints UK project. In this project, OCLC researchers will develop Web services for enhancing metadata with DDC categories. Project partner, UKOLN, will harvest metadata from e-print repositories at UK educational institutions. The metadata records will then be transferred to the DDC service hosted at OCLC for enhancement. OCLC researchers are also prototyping Web services for use in other projects. These services will use the DDC as well as other terminology resources available at OCLC. Dr. Vizine-Goetz and her team are researching new technologies and resources for extending the range of OCLC knowledge organization resources and services.
Stuart Weibel, Consulting Research Scientist and Executive Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), briefed the RAC on DCMI activities over the past year. Among the highlights:
- DCMI hired a managing director, Makx Dekkers, in March 2001.
- The organization created its first Board of Trustees in February 2002.
- Adobe Corp. announced in August that a Dublin Core-based metadata facility would be included in Acrobat, and eventually in all of its products.
- A liaison between Dublin Core (DC) and the IEEE will promote convergence between DC metadata and the IEEE's Learning Object Metadata (IEEE-LOM).
- DC-2001, the 2001 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, was held in Tokyo in October.
- DC became a ANSI/NISO standard in August 2001.
- DC was reconfirmed by the Open Archives Initiative technical committee as the OAI base metadata standard.
Dr. Weibel demonstrated RDF (Resource Description Framework) interoperability as part of his report on DCMI and the World-Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Activity, and described DCMI's Open Metadata Registry project.
Interested readers will find more information on the DCMI Web site and in the article, "Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Progress Report and Workplan for 2002," in D-Lib Magazine (Vol. 8, no. 2), by Makx Dekkers and Stuart L. Weibel.
Thom Hickey, Chief Scientist, reported on the Advanced Collections Environment (ACE) project, which investigates centralized solutions to personal collection management and uses the Application Service Provider (ASP) model for managing collections.
Dr. Hickey explained that a project starting with personal collections is simpler than working immediately with institutional collections. It allows more experimentation, but many findings should apply to the library setting.
ACE is intended to be a complete service for the serious collector. Its records are based on Dublin Core, and it emphasizes management rather than commerce.
ACE is a browser-based service, implemented with Zope, an open-source web-application server, and the Python programming language. It uses RDF descriptions of collections and records.
Specific challenges in the project include developing adequate searching facilities given that ACE is a collection of diverse collections, privacy, authority control, report generation, and user-interface issues. Possibilities for future exploration include connecting to a simplified Z39.50 server (SRW; see Ralph LeVan's report below) and investigating the use of ACE with special collections.
Lorraine Normore, Consulting Research Scientist, reported on her investigations of special collections in institutional settings. This work:
- explores common functional activities across a variety of institutions
- seeks to identify roles and responsibilities
- attempts to understand values and "drivers" within the institutional setting.
Dr. Normore uses a methodology known as Contextual Design, developed by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer, which:
- involves developing teams with members of varied backgrounds who visit typical environments for close observation, interviewing, and documentation
- provides a structure for integrating information across interviews
- stresses:
- getting as close as possible to the actual work in the environments visited
- actively working with the user
- getting at underlying meanings
- learning what you need to know as you investigate the setting.
The fieldwork and initial organization of data has been completed in this project, but analysis is not yet finished. So far the following areas have been identified as distinguishing special collections from libraries:
- finances
- metadata
- access
- preservation and digitization
- rights management
The internal roles most common in the settings studied include:
- collection manager
- curator
- archivist
- development officer
Other internal roles also occur, as do external ones (e.g., donors, users, appraisers, funders).
Significant entities within these environments are:
- the special collections themselves
- finding aids
- web sites
- exhibits
It is clear at this stage that the twenty collections studied are different from libraries (even though some of them occur in libraries), and that they have special needs for metadata and outreach that may differ from those of libraries.
Thom Hickey also reported on the Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs) project, focusing on thesis metadata via the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). This is a light-weight protocol for moving or sharing metadata that allows synchronization of loosely coupled databases and mandates XML Dublin Core as the default metadata format.
The goals of Dr. Hickey's project are to:
- investigate OAI-PMH by participating in beta-tests
- promote the use of theses and dissertations
- investigate services that can be built with OAI-PMH
- understand OAI-PMH from both serving and harvesting viewpoints.
So far the project team has written a harvester and server in Java, and brought up a database of 4.3 million thesis and dissertation records from WorldCat. Names in the database are linked to the Library of Congress Name Authority file, and searching is provided via OCLC's SiteSearch software.
Dr. Hickey reported that OAI-PMH is expected to be the major method of moving large amounts of metadata between systems. It can be useful for interoperability beyond simple metadata, and useful for repositories even without harvesting. Current plans for the project include making a searchable version public via SRW (see below), making sets harvestable via OAI-PMH, bringing up a 2.0 server, merging in other sets of theses, and working on harvesting other OAI servers.
Consulting Research Scientist Ralph LeVan discussed his work with the Z39.50 Implementors Group (ZIG) and two of its initiatives.
The Search and Retrieve on the Web (SRW) project investigates providing Z39.50 as a Web Service. Mr. LeVan explained that classic Z39.50 has not been popular with the Web community because it:
- is complicated
- requires connection-based sessions, uses binary encoding
- is transmitted directly over TCP/IP.
On the other hand, Z39.50 allows for result sets (statefulness) and abstraction (abstract access points/attribute sets, abstract record schemas).
SRW uses the Simple Object Access Protocol, known as SOAP, as the information-exchange mechanism and the Web Service Description Language, or WSDL, for record description. In contrast to the eighteen native and extended services supported under classic Z39.50, SRW supports only one (SearchAndRetrieve). It is semantically equivalent to classic Z39.50, which makes gateways trivial and preserves the experience of the Z39.50 community without the overhead of the standard.
Mr. LeVan outlined aspects of SRW requests and responses, its common query language, and the fact that SRW supports the explain service, which had never been practical in classic Z39.50.
The ZIG also is exploring SRU, or Search and Retrieve with URLs, which Mr. LeVan described as SRW without the SOAP wrapper. SRU adds a ResponseSchema parameter and is intended for thin clients, where the browser is the application. The market for SRU currently is underdeveloped, and it may be a while before the library community adopts it. It could show up in other communities first, and may be seen as a competitor with XML Query.
More information is available.
Cathy De Rosa, OCLC Vice President, Corporate Marketing, provided an update on corporate marketing plans and activities. She described the goal of the Corporate Marketing Division as delivering tools and methods that connect the value of OCLC with the people we serve, in a way that can be understood, absorbed, valued, and promoted.
Brian Lavoie, Research Scientist, reported on the OCLC/RLG collaboration on the development of digital preservation infrastructure. The plan is to facilitate consensus-building among stakeholders and to identify and support standards and best practices. Two working groups have been established (described below). Mr. Lavoie explained that preservation metadata generally is created, maintained, and utilized in an archival setting. It informs and documents actions taken to preserve a digital object's bit stream over the long-term, supports the rendering and understanding of a preserved digital object's content, and represents the information infrastructure necessary to support preservation of, and ongoing access to, digital objects.
The Preservation Metadata Working Group (PMWG), which is led by OCLC, brings together digital preservation experts from diverse institutional and geographic backgrounds within the library/cultural-institution community. Its objectives are to develop a comprehensive preservation metadata framework, applicable to a broad range of digital preservation activities, and to examine issues surrounding implementation and practical use of metadata in support of digital preservation. Milestones achieved to date include a white paper on the "state of the art" in preservation metadata and a two-part report on preservation metadata and the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) information model. Both reports are available on the PMWG Web site.
The goals of the RLG-led Working Group on Attributes of a Trusted Digital Repository are to specify characteristics of a sustainable digital archive for large-scale heterogeneous collections and to provide a foundation for the establishment of certification programs for digital archives (as recommended by the 1996 Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information report). Its work includes consideration of administrative responsibility, technological suitability, organizational viability, system security, economic sustainability, and procedural accountability. The group has published a report, Attributes of Trusted Digital Repository: Meeting the Needs of Research Resources, which currently is available for public comment on the Working Group Web site.
Mr. Lavoie reported widespread recognition that collaboration is the most likely vehicle for advancing the research agenda for digital preservation, given the shared challenges facing stakeholders, a desire to avoid duplicating effort, and the benefits of working out issues of standardization and interoperability. The scope of collaboration potentially includes working across units within OCLC as well as with external organizations within the library/cultural-institution community or beyond.
Chandra Prabha, Senior Research Scientist, presented an overview of her work assessing public libraries' use of the Web. The objectives of her study were to assess how visible public libraries are on the Web and what public libraries are doing to provide access to Web resources.
Dr. Prabha took a random sample of 200 public libraries and sought to identify whether each library in the sample maintained a presence on the World-Wide Web. She did this twice for each library, once in winter 2001, and again in winter 2002. Dr. Prabha also e-mailed a survey to the libraries in the sample, in order to determine who hosts PL Web sites, who designs them, who maintains/updates the sites, and how often. This phase of the project is still in progress.
Dr. Prabha concluded that both public libraries and the Web are reaching the general public. Both public libraries and the Web provide access to everyday information (e.g., ready reference & its variations), community information, and current information. Some public libraries use the Web effectively to meet the everyday information needs of the general public.
Dr. Prabha summarized her work by saying that most public libraries have a door on the Web and there has been a 15% increase in public libraries' presence on the web from 2001 to 2002. Nonetheless, librarians fear loss of support for public libraries and user surveys indicate a preference for the Web. She concluded that public libraries clearly are trying to weave themselves into the web, and asked how the OCLC Cooperative can more effectively weave the Web into public libraries?
Consulting Research Scientist Jean Godby demonstrated subject navigation of Web sites using RDF topic maps, which are created by:
- normalizing input data (e.g., Web page files) by removing HTML tags and other programming codes
- extracting common terms from the text
- analyzing relationships among extracted terms
- filtering terms and relationships contextually
- structuring filtered terms for representation in an RDF graph.
Some topics generally are found to be unique to specific sites, while others are common to multiple sites. Dr. Godby gathered subject/topic metadata from Web sites by examining:
- HTML keywords
- subject lines in email messages
- an index of library/information science terms (relevant for the sites used in her demonstration)
- terms extracted automatically from text using natural-language-processing algorithms.
Some of the term relationships found on the sites were identified as:
- singular/plural
- acronyms
- coordination (e.g., library and information science--library science, information science)
- broad/narrow
- related (e.g., Library-library classification scheme, library automation).
The subject/topic extraction software is embedded in a library of Open Source code that:
- harvests Web pages from a list of URLs supplied by the user
- extracts simple metadata and encodes it in RDF
- normalizes the text for the NLP component
- creates a MySQL database of RDF relationships
- makes the results available to the user through XSL stylesheets.
Open issues include:
- RDF knowledge in the user interface
- whether to encode in RDF or XML
- the construction of knowledge ontologies.
Dr. Godby concludes from her project results thus far that the enterprise succeeds or fails on the strength of the knowledge ontology. Sophisticated user interface design is required to exploit all of the encoded information. Demo and Open Source code are accessible at: http://topicmaps.oclc.org:5000
Neil McLean spoke on interoperability issues between Learning and Information Spaces.
Online learning environments:
- involve learning management systems
- involve content management systems
- involve learning content management systems
- provide the core platform for the online learning experience.
Information spaces are dominated by:
- libraries
- the Web
- other information resources-both on-campus and off.
Ideally, these domains would be readily accessible to the teacher or learner at any point in the teaching/learning cycle. Enterprise systems would provide an institutional management context.
Thus, key technical goals for the realization of a truly integrated learning information environment would be:
- to facilitate interactions between learning management systems, content management systems and learning content management systems
- interoperability with the library/information domains
- links to enterprise systems
- development of collaborative interactive learning and information environments.
The technical issues that must be addressed to meet these goals include:
- development of metadata application profiles and accompanying vocabularies and thesauri
- development and maintenance of registries
- directory schemas for people, resources and services
- development of search protocols encompassing Z39.50 and XML-query
- harmonisation of technical architectures with the emerging industry standards stack of XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL.
In particular, Mr. McLean envisions the strategic challenges for OCLC as:
- the scope and nature of engagement in the learning space interoperability agenda
- the choice of collaborative partners
- the development of open systems industry-compliant platforms
- the identification of service and business opportunities.
With that in mind, he proposed a project to develop searchable open archives repositories for learning resources, arguing that such activity would:
- meet an emerging need in the learning/information space
- signal a clear strategic direction for new OCLC services
- span the information and learning communities
- provide a low cost, widely applicable technical solution that fits within an industry-compatible open-systems Web-services framework.
Ed O'Neill, Thom Hickey, and Jean Godby made a coordinated series of four presentations on topics related to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) project known as Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, or FRBR:
- Dr. O'Neill made presentations on FRBR itself
- Dr. Godby made a comparison of FRBR and another model for bibliographic representation known as Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce Systems, or INDECS
- Dr. O'Neill described the conversion of a set of bibliographic records to conform to FRBR requirements, a process informally referred to as "FRBRization."
- Dr. Hickey spoke on algorithms used in the conversion process reported by Dr. O'Neill.
Ed O'Neill reported that an IFLA study group issued the FRBR recommendations in 1998. If fully implemented, FRBR would produce the biggest change cataloging has seen in the last century. FRBR is an entity-relationship model of metadata for information objects, instead of the single flat record conceptualized by AACR and MARC.
The goals of the OCLC project are to:
- examine the benefits and problems associated with the FRBRization of an exemplary work
- better understand the relationship between the bibliographic records and the bibliographic objects they represent
- determine if the information available in the bibliographic record is sufficient to reliably identify FRBR entities.
FRBR conceptualizes three groups of entities:
- Group 1 consists of the products of intellectual or artistic endeavor (e.g., publications).
- Group 2 comprises those entities responsible for intellectual or artistic content (a person or corporate body).
- Group 3 includes the entities that serve as subjects of intellectual or artistic endeavor (concept, object, event, and place).
The internal subdivision of Group One entities is important as well. FRBR specifies that intellectual or artistic products include the following types of entities:
- the work, which is a distinct intellectual or artistic creation
- the expression, the intellectual or artistic realization of a work
- the manifestation, the physical embodiment of an expression of a work
- the item, a single exemplar of a manifestation.
Furthermore, FRBR specifies particular relationships between classes of Group One entities:
- a work is realized through one or more
- expressions, each of which is embodied in one or more
- manifestations, each of which is exemplified by one or more items.
Dr. O'Neill explained that we currently describe a bibliographic unit out of context. With FRBR the items must be described in context in a manner sufficient to relate the item to the other items comprising the work. AACR2 is focused on the physical manifestation while FRBR uses the four-level bibliographic structure outlined above.
Jean Godby spoke to the committee and audience about FRBR and INDECS, both of which are entity-relationship models for information objects.
- FRBR is about functional requirements for bibliographic records
- INDECS focuses on the interoperability of data in e-commerce systems.
FRBR goals:
- Create a commonly shared understanding of the content of the typical bibliographic record.
- Provide information about how the record should meet the user's needs.
- Eventually extend the analysis to authority records.
INDECS goal:
- Create a standardized semantic framework for integrating metadata in the Web environment. Dr. Godby instantiated and illustrated this approach by using a model of intellectual property.
Although INDECS is conceptually similar to FRBR, it also is more generic. It proposes a data dictionary of metadata objects and encodes a detailed proposal for intellectual property rights.
The INDECS model includes three basic entities:
- person
- creation
- transaction
It also specifies four relations among them:
- a person makes a creation
- a creation is used by a person
- a person do[es] a transaction
- a transaction is about a creation.
Furthermore, the model specifies three primary types of creation:
- manifestation
- performance
- work
and four relations among them:
- a performance is fixed in a manifestation
- manifestations are abstracted to works
- works are expressed in either performances or manifestations
- performances are abstracted to works.
INDECS treats metadata as events, not resources, an approach that has some advantages:
- Events can be used to create the maximum number of metadata relations without duplication.
- Events provide a common structure for integrating creative, commercial and legal "views."
- Events provide an efficient means to track changes, and they can be viewed at different levels of granularity.
INDECS events include:
- creating events (agent, input, output, context)
- usage events (user, input, context),which are defined as an event in which one creation is used
- the use of creations to make other creations
- the dissemination or distribution of creations for any purpose
- the perception or enjoyment of a creation in a given mode
- the possession of a creation.
INDECS transactions describe rights ownership and actions that can be taken with creations. Rights transactions depend on a chain of transfers of rights and permissions. The INDECS term "agreement" captures the notion of accord between two parties. INDECS recognizes the transaction relations of Work - Agreement - {Agent (consenters) | Output (permision, requirement, prohibition) | Context (time, place)}. It also recognizes the transfer of intellectual property rights through the term iprTransfer and the relations Work - iprTransfer - {Agent (granter, grantee) | Input (transferred right, controlled creation) | Context }.
Dr. Godby considered whether INDECS might be a proper standard for OCLC, considering its interest in intellectual property, interoperability, and preservation, but she also noted the existence of problematic issues related to FRBR and implementation of the model.
Ed O'Neill described the FRBRization of Humphry Clinker, a project undertaken because studying a single work in depth can provide a level of understanding not possible with a larger group. The eighteenth-century Clinker is an epistolary novel, presenting a series of letters from members of a particular family as they travel about Britain. It has been previously studied by the Office of Research, and is considered to be of mid-level complexity and not atypical of works in the WorldCat database. Furthermore, it is widely held, with 184 records in WorldCat and over 5,000 holdings. The sense was that if serious difficulties were encountered in the process of FRBRizing Clinker, then such difficulties would be likely for many other works as well.
The goals of studying this work were:
- to examine the benefits and problems associated with creating an entity-relationship model for a non-trivial work (known as FRBRizing or FRBRization)
- to better understand the relationship between the bibliographic records and the bibliographic objects they represent
- to determine if the information available in the bibliographic record is sufficient to reliably identify the FRBR entities
- to develop a data set that could be used to evaluate FRBRization algorithms.
The objective of the Humphry Clinker analysis was to organize the bibliographic objects represented by bibliographic records, not simply to organize the records. To determine if two records were for the same expression, the question was whether the objects represented by the records had the identical content; not about the similarity of the records.
In order to collect the bibliographic records, WorldCat was searched for all possible Humphrey Clinker records. A total of 179 records were found. Thirty-eight actual books were examined, and 600 digital photographs were taken of key pages. Researchers identified a number of types of revisions to the original text, including the correction of errors, replacing of archaic character forms with modern letters, repositioning dates on the letters that convey the story, and adding chapter titles. Numerous other augmentations were identified as well.
A set of elements of the bibliographic record was identified as crucial for the determination of different expressions:
- added entries
- statement of responsibility
- notes
- edition statement
- the physical description-especially notations of illustrative material.
Another set was identified as key for the determination of different manifestations:
- publisher
- date of publication
- statement of responsibility
- notes
- edition statement
- physical description-especially size and pagination
- any reproduction note.
At this stage of the project the following FRBR components have been identified for Humphry Clinker:
- 48 different expressions of the work, including (in addition to the unedited version):
- 8 translations
- 39 augmentations.
- A total of 114 manifestations also were identified, including:
- 8 from the translations
- 43 from the unedited version
- 63 from the augmentations.
- Although it was not possible to trace all items emanating this work, 18 microforms and 51 printings and duplicates were identified.
Dr. O'Neill's conclusions:
- The FRBR notion of work is a valuable concept.
- It provides a means to aggregate bibliographic units to simplify database organization and retrieval.
- Works can reliably be identified from bibliographic records.
- When any modifications to a work "no matter how minor" are considered to be new expressions, the granularity of resulting expressions is too fine and can be almost indistinguishable from that of manifestations.
- Bibliographic records do not contain sufficient information to reliably identify expressions
- Reliable identification requires physical examination of selected items.
- Duplicate records could pose a serious problem.
Thom Hickey made the final presentation in the FRBR series, describing algorithms and tools used in the analysis of Humphry Clinker. Researchers made a copy of WorldCat that included holdings data and LC authorities, and created a personal author file. The structure allowed them to process WorldCat as a single file.
Records were structured in MARC Communications format (LC's MARCMaker format) and processed in Unicode. The first step was to divide the database into works and expressions and tabulate statistics (including holdings).
The basic work algorithm involved optionally processing Library of Congress records first. The most common works got priority. The first work with an 'exact' match on author and title was taken as the base record, otherwise the first partial match was used. If there was no partial match, the record was assumed to represent a new work. Strings were extensively normalized regarding punctuation, diacritics, and capitalization. Leading articles and common abbreviations were dropped from titles.
When it was determined that a new record represented a previously identified work, all the titles found in the new record were added to the list of acceptable titles for the work. Similarly, all authors were added to work's list of acceptable authors. Furthermore, all titles and authors in the record were added to the list of acceptable titles.
The basic expression algorithm stipulated no partial matching or order for expressions. Records with added entries were processed first. Records were put in the first expression that matched; otherwise a new expression was created within the work.
In order to match expressions, titles must match 'exactly,' i.e., all surnames found in the record must match those in the expression. If there were only a partial match on surnames, then it would be considered the same expression if the pagination (both decimal and Roman) matched.
When adding a record to an existing expression, names and title to match against were taken from the record that created the expression.
Dr. Hickey concluded his presentation by demonstrating a browser interface that had been developed to view records in the FRBR database.
Lorcan Dempsey invited participation from members in a strategic outlook discussion, in order to consider the current status of work in the OR, as well as what might be done in the future. The meeting ended following a subsequent executive session between RAC members and officers of OCLC. The next meeting of the Research Advisory Committee is scheduled for August 1-2.
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