Alessandro Bollini, Jacopo Di Cocco and Peter Burnhill introduce the Telematics for Libraries CASA Project.
The CASA project aims to develop tools and services in support of European co-operation on serials, articles and related services. The major building blocks for the envisaged CASA network include: |
Identifiers, most notably ISSN and SICI, play a central role: by providing a definitive identification of serial items they enable service providers to make their offer known on the network: they also enable end users to swiftly move from bibliographic services to actual, possibly on-line, serial contents.
From a technical point of view the project is intended to foster a widespread adoption of digital techniques in the process of producing, disseminating and accessing serial-related information. This goal is being pursued through the definition of an integrated network architecture, the development of a reference client-server implementation and the deployment of a network of pilot servers, which will provide the basic resources required to develop local value-added services
The networked version of the ISSN International Register provides a most authoritative source for the identification of serials and, thereby, of articles. This distributed application includes facilities for searching the content of the register, submitting and managing registration proposals and amendments, distributing updates to co-operating servers.
The backbone of the CASA network is built around a hierarchical collection of HTTP servers providing access to the ISSN Register at the international, national and community level. Servers share a common modular and customisable software architecture implemented in Java and provide an extensive toolkit of network and bibliographic functions for developing local add-on applications.
A distributed directory of serial services and service providers, implemented with the same technology being developed for the distributed article register, is expected to enable libraries, union catalogues, publishers and commercial suppliers of serial-related services to make their offer known to readers and librarians and to act as a link from bibliographic services to e-commerce networks.
An article register is planned to complement the networked version of the ISSN International Register and to provide users with an extensive source of citation-level bibliographic data. However, the lack of a single comprehensive source of article references and the huge amount of information that a centralised article register would hold prevent it to be implemented with the same technology adopted for the serial register. We have opted instead for a distributed, virtual register that provides readers with data retrieved on the fly from a large number of co-operating local servers, taking advantage of state of the art distributed network technologies and high-speed European network connections. RDF and CORBA are currently being considered for implementing a first prototype of this service, to be also backed by a Z39.50 implementation, in order to ease the transition from the current generation of distributed bibliographic applications.
The partners in the project consortium represent the various groups involved in the serials chain: publishing; bibliographic management of serials (at ISSN Centres, union catalogues, and libraries); processing of users' requests at libraries. The consortium has five full partners: the Interlibrary Centre of the University of Bologna, the ISSN International Centre, the University of Edinburgh Data Library (representing SALSER - Scottish Academic Libraries Serials), the Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico e per le informazioni bibliografiche (the Italian union catalogue for serials and monographs) and Ariadne S.r.l. (a software house). The consortium also includes four "associated partners”, associated with either the University of Bologna or the ISSN International Centre: the Istituto per i beni culturali e ambientali della Regione Emilia Romagna; the ISRDS-CNR, having both the role of the Italian ISSN Centre and the union catalogue of serials; the Norwegian ISSN centre, and the Greek ISSN Centre. Five subcontractors also take part in the consortium: the University of Florence, the University of Ferrara, the University of Turin, the Academic Press "Il Mulino," and the University Library of Bologna. The National Library of Florence, which acts as the Italian national bibliography for ISSN purposes, is a sponsor of the CASA Project.
The CASA Project should result in improvements to existing ISSN procedures. For the ISSN International Centre, these include the validation procedures of new ISSNs as well as receipt of requests for further bibliographic information; for ISSN national centres, they include the assignment of new ISSN, the addition of new records or the amendment of existing ones. CASA should also improve the mechanisms of collaboration between ISSN Centres and bibliographic agencies through the application of telematic methods to facilitate the exchange of data. ISSN Centres may not actually hold serial issues and may therefore need to receive photocopies of the title pages of serials from union catalogues and libraries, in order to be able to submit to the ISSN International Centre proposals for the input of records for new titles or amendments to existing records. The CASA procedure should ensure greater access to a regularly updated -and thus more authoritative - serials register.
Union catalogues will also benefit from the project in a number of ways. CASA will investigate the use of the ISSN system in the design of union catalogues. The project will provide a mechanism allowing professional users to add ISSN to catalogue records of serials. In addition it will define procedures for catalogues to adopt in order to increase their interoperability. It will develop software that will facilitate matches of records between existing catalogues and the ISSN Register, and semi-automatic conversion tools and procedures that will allow the bulk transfer of existing data records in national catalogues into a national CASA server. Only in ambiguous cases records will have to be processed manually.
Service providers will be able to use CASA to create a shop window for their products. In this directory, libraries are viewed as but one class of provider of services on serials, alongside publishers, indexers, secondary vendors and other providers of document delivery services. It is well known that for the end user, the article is the intellectual work, or information object that matters; serials are important only because they contain articles, but their importance as aggregations of articles is expected to continue. Publishers of serials have recognised that efficient trade in these and other information fragments require a system of authoritative and unique numbering, equivalent to that of the ISSN. (There are several candidates, but the one favoured in the CASA project has been the Serial Item Contribution Identifier - SICI – because it includes the ISSN). This has prompted discussion of the utility for the emergent information economy of one or more servers acting as «Yellow Pages» directory of services on serials and articles. This raises the choice of standard for the metadata about the content and the location of these services, and the extent to which these should adhere to conventions of the bibliographic world, those of networked (digital) information objects, or those of the world of business.
The project itself will not directly organise a document delivery or interlibrary loan system, but will enable and assist links to providers of such services.
The Interlibrary Centre - which acts as project co-ordinator - proposes to distribute a library of programmes that can be adopted and freely developed. This approach, using the GNU Library, allows that the CASA products be tested and accepted by the largest number of bibliographic services and facilitate creating library inter alia a virtual library of serials. As far as data are concerned, access and distribution are to be defined by each owner of copyright, according to the market situation. Some catalogues will offer free access, others will require payment.
As a result of the large use of electronic commerce and of metacataloguing, promotional activities also include offering distributed bibliographies for free, shifting revenue to single articles purchases rather than whole issue purchase. CASA may also offer small and middle-sized publishers the opportunity to acquire visibility on end users at low costs. On the other hand, research and statistic bodies and public institutions reports consider their institutional task to publish the result of their activity and are therefore often willing to offer it on the network for free.
Information systems will be essentially virtual, as most Internet services are, and therefore they will be the result of an integration of services offered by different institutions or providers.
The development Consortium of CASA will probably be created at the end of the project to promote the growth of the product, and will take W3C as model, with the aim of keeping CASA aligned with the evolution which the W3C consortium will define for the WWW.
The open politics and the free distribution of the product should allow a significant reduction of software maintenance costs. The distribution of integrated information systems leaves to each provider of information the task of covering costs and the definition of criteria for fixing fees. Therefore the Consortium and its services could be covered either with partners' contribution or by promotional activities. As far as public bodies are concerned, the need of disseminating their results and producing documentation of the results is crucial, but it is even more important to have the possibility of offering permanent training on services and technologies, taking advantage of telematic resources and disseminating new technologies to improve productive activities. This permits the creation of "externalities" which are a crucial and institutional task for public bodies. Such externalities will be oxygen for local companies which will increase their competitiveness and will limit the phenomena of delocalisation of resources of the need of limiting resources to re-acquire the economic balance.
Further the interactive system to feed the ISSN Register with proposals of addition and modification, the possibility to allow the catalogues and bibliographies migration, and the two versions of distributed Serials Services Directory, some significant developments have already been sketched and part of them are already being developed. Some of such developments have initially been conceived for Italian adoption, but when drawn, resulted in open models and will be offered world-wide to improve international co-operation. Such developments include:
The CASA Consortium is presently developing the SW modules which will be delivered by the end of 1999. The first half of 2000 will be the pilot phase and beta phase. In the second half of 2000 it will be used in the production run phase.
Figure 1: CASA Web Site |
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Alessandro Bollini
Technical Manager, CASA Project
Email: bollini@casa.issn.org
Jacopo Di Cocco
Director, CASA project
Email: dicocco@cib.unibo.it
Dr. Peter Burnhill
SALSER Team Leader
Edinburgh University Computing Services
Data Library, Main Library Buildings
George Square
EH89LJ
Edinburgh
Telephone: +44 131 6503306
Fax: +44 131 6503308
Email: p.burnhill@ed.ac.uk
|
Alessandro Bollini is the Technical Manager of the CASA project. He holds a Doctorate in Computer Engineering from the University of Pavia and has been involved with the design of web-based bibliographic applications for the Inter-Library Center of the University of Bologna since 1992. brief biographies here. Prof. Jacopo Di Cocco is the Director of the Interlibrary Centre of the University of Bologna and the Director of the CASA project. Professor of National Accounting, Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Bologna. Has played a leading role in the automation and networking of the University Library system aimed at providing a wide range of services using ALMANET (University of Bologna's network) which connects university departmental libraries distributed over the regional territory. Peter Burnhill is Director of the EDINA UK National Datacentre (at the University of Edinburgh) which hosts SALSER - the 'virtual' union catalogue of serials in Scotland's university and research libraries, and is the CASA Partner with lead responsiblity for distributed systems within CASA. Formally qualified as a statistician and social scientist, he is an information methodogist who specialises in data library methods and the design of metadata systems. Over the past fifteen years he has developed extensive experience in information systems, as consultant, as director of university projects, and now as director of national data services. |
For
citation purposes:
Alessandro Bollini, Jacopo Di Cocco, Peter Burnhill,
"A Co-operative Archive of Serials and Articles,"
Exploit Interactive, issue 2, 20 July 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue2/casa/>
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