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Trudi Noordermeer describes BIBLINK (Linking Publishers and National Bibliographic Services) - a project to create a bibliographic link between publishers of electronic resources and national bibliographic agencies.
Project BIBLINK [1] aims to establish a relationship between national bibliographic agencies and publishers of electronic resources, in order to create authoritative bibliographic information that will benefit both sectors. In the digital information environment, the role of national bibliographic agencies will probably become increasingly dependent upon the generation of electronic links between publishers and other agents in the bibliographic chain. The concept of BIBLINK crystallised from the work of the EU concerted action CoBRA. It was recognised that the significant growth in electronic publishing could result in valuable publications being unrecorded as they would by-pass established national bibliographic procedures. Given the nature of the medium it was felt the issues could be most effectively addressed at an international level. Project BIBLINK takes advantage of the bibliographic expertise of five national libraries in Europe, working in conjunction with partners in the publishing sector and higher education, to examine the way in which electronic publications are described for catalogues and other listings and how this information can be transmitted between the two sectors.
BIBLINK is a proof of concept project to assess the feasibility of the direct exchange of data between publishers and national libraries. The overall objective of the project is to produce a demonstration system that will further the improvement of national bibliographic services by establishing a link between the publishers of electronic documents and national bibliographic agencies. This link will allow publishers of various types to transmit bibliographic data about electronic publications to their national bibliographic agency for inclusion in the bibliography. It will also allow for the resulting record to be re-transmittted to the publisher for embedding in the publication if so desired, or for use in other applications, such as sales promotions. These objectives can be detailed as follows:
The project officially started on 15 May 1996 and was divided into two phases, each of eighteen months duration. An extension was needed to the second phase in order to develop the system and to have time to run a meaningful demonstration phase. The end date of the project is now 15 February 2000. The first stage can be described as the research and consensus building phase during which information was gathered and analysed about the various components that contribute to a data generation, transmission and conversion system. The research entailed considerable discussion with publishers and consensus with them as to the most promising technical solutions to implement.
The following decisions were taken and the reports with detailed information are available via the BIBLINK website. The scope of the project is very broad: both on line and off line publications are taken into consideration. Several metadata formats were investigated and it was decided – in 1997! - to add three fields to the Dublin Core metadata set: the BIBLINK core metadata set (see Table 1). Several unique identifiers can be used like ISBN, ISSN, SICI and DOI. During consensus building workshops with the publishers decisions were taken about cooperation. The UNIMARC format was chosen as the central format and conversion is possible to and from several national MARC formats and to BIBLINK Core. For the conversion the USEMARCON software is used. For transmission of data email or a web form can be used. For authentication of publications and corresponding metadata a hash value is calculated. These were the results of the first phase.
In the second stage the demonstration system is being developed and tested and will be implemented. The company Jouve in Paris developed the software together with the project partners. The work began by formalising the User Requirements and producing a detailed Functional Specification and resulted in the demonstration and validation of a prototype system at various test sites. An exploitation plan is being developed to provide a framework for library partners to assess the possibility of incorporating the system in operational procedures.
| BIBLINK data element | Brief description |
| DC.Title | Title of work |
| DC.Creator | Persons or organisations primary responsible for intellectual content |
| DC | Subject Subject keywords, may also contain terms from published subject headings or classification schemes |
| DC.Description | Description of content or abstract |
| DC.Publisher | Agency responsible for producing the publication |
| DC.Contributor | Persons or organisations responsible for content not included under DC.Creator |
| DC.Date | Date of publication |
| DC.Format | Format information |
| DC.Identifier | A unique identifier, e.g. ISBN, SICI or DOI |
| DC.Language | Language of text |
| DC.Rights | Terms and conditions information |
| BIBLINK.Checksum | Hash value or checksum computed for authentication purposes |
| BIBLINK.edition | Number of edition or version |
| BIBLINK.extent | The size of an item – number of files, bytes etc. |
| BIBLINK.Frequency | Frequency of issue if a serial publication |
| BIBLINK.PlacePublication | Geographical location of publisher |
| BIBLINK.Price | Price |
| BIBLINK.Systems | Requirements System Requirements |
Figure 1 shows a model of the BIBLINK Workspace. This is described in more detail in the following section.
 Figure 1: Model of the BIBLINK Workspace |
The core of the BIBLINK demonstrator consists of a computer mediated working environment called the BIBLINK Workspace (BW). It can be envisaged as a virtual workspace encompassing a database and functionality that allows, in the first instance, publishers to create records and subsequently give access to participants to retrieve, update and, ultimately, delete those records. The BW converts the data between the formats required by the various parties and provides the mechanisms necessary for the functioning and management of the system. It allows the various parties to view and download the records or elements in the records in different formats at various stages in the development of the record. Users are working in the BW according to a pre-established user profile defining access rights and those aspects of interaction with the BW that are configurable. The NBAs vary in the way they apply the use of the BW to their current procedures and each specified the flow of work within their own organisation. They wanted to configure the actions that the BW carries out in relation to events in the life of the BIBLINK Workspace Records (BWR) according to local practices. For example one NBA may want to be notified about a new record as soon as it is created by a publisher, whereas another will only want to be notified once a specified third party like an ISBN office has added an identifier to a new record. The situation is similar with the publisher participants: one wants to be sent an enhanced BC record as soon as the NBA has updated the original but another wishes only to be notified that an identifier has been added to allow them to retrieve it when they are ready to do so. These preferences are specified in the User Profile established for each participant. To give a picture of how the flow of metadata from publisher to NBA and back is envisaged, an examples of usage scenario is given below.
In this scenario we consider a small Internet publisher Publisher-X, who wishes to supply simple metadata about their publications to the National Bibliographic Agency (NBA) in order that each publication appears in the National Bibliography and so that an enhanced Dublin Core-like bibliographic record can be embedded into the HTML of Publisher-X's Web pages. Publications are made available on the Web prior to notification being sent to the NBA. No formal 'identifier', such as an ISSN or DOI, is required for each publication. The NBA in question has provided a set of conversion tables to allow the minimal BIBLINK UNIMARC record to be converted to and from NatMARC records. Below is a brief description of the flow of metadata between Publisher-X and the NBA using the BIBLINK Workspace (BW).
Other scenarios are also available [2].
At the time of writing (December 1999) the BIBLINK partners are working on the demonstration. In February 2000 approximately 2000 bibliographic records of electronic resources, 400 of each national library, will be available in the BIBLINK Workspace. The national libraries are working on the implementation of BIBLINK in the existing workflow of their national bibliographic agencies. The software is available for UNIX and Windows.
Trudi Noordermeer
Koninklijke Bibliotheek
National Library of the Netherlands
Senior Researcher
Department of Research and Network Information
PO Box 90407
2509 LK Den Haag
The Netherlands
Tel : + 31-70-3140597
Fax : + 31-70-3140424
Email : trudi.noordermeer@konbib.nl
KB website at <http://www.konbib.nl/>
BIBLINK website at <http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/biblink/>
Thanos Massias introduces the DIEPER project.
Digitising of existing printed material (retrodigitising) has become a very important
topic in recent years. Advances in the relevant technologies have made the task more
affordable in terms of cost, time and labour intensity. On the other hand the demand for
digitised material is growing rapidly and it is anticipated that this trend will continue.
As a consequence, many initiatives have been undertaken on this field by various parties,
including publishers, libraries and various institutions.
An important fact to note is that there is no standard approach to the digitisation of printed material. This is true not only for the technical aspects (e.g. digitising equipment, output formats, type of storage, methods of access) but also for things like the motivation and objectives, the selection of the original material, the targeted audience, and so on.
Why are users interested in digitised documents? There are a number of reasons:
Why are libraries interested in digitised documents? We can note the following:
It is time to see how DIEPER fits into the picture. The DIEPER partners are convinced that digitising is going to continue at an increasing rate. Especially when it comes to Europe, it should be pointed out that although much hard work is done in this area, the amount of coordination is low. Many different initiatives of varying scales are undertaken by the private and public sector at levels from local to European. Thus the whole effort is not very well coordinated, resulting in overlapping, poor inter-operability and other unwanted effects. This situation is expected to improve in the future. In the meantime there are things which should be done:
Those are exactly the points that DIEPER intends to address. To keep the program as realistic as possible, a hands-on approach was selected. The entire process of digitisation will be explored by focusing on a carefully selected set of European periodicals.
The objectives of the DIEPER project are:
The DIEPER project started in November 1998 and will last 26 months. It is managed and co-ordinated by the State and University Library of Lower Saxony (Goettingen/Germany).
The following partners participate in the DIEPER project:
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Thanos Massias
Dipl. Mechanical Engineer
Library & Information Service
University of Patras
Greece
Email: thanos@lis.upatras.gr
Titia van der Werf-Davelaar introduces NEDLIB: Networked European Deposit Library.
Within the broader context of preserving the national cultural heritage, deposit libraries are tasked to ensure that published material, whether in written, printed or electronic form, is preserved for use now and in the future.
Whilst the deposit process for printed publications is well established, this is not the case for electronic publications. Since 1995, deposit libraries are addressing this new challenge and they do so increasingly in collaboration, under the umbrella of the Conference of European National Libraries (CENL) and the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL). Jointly on an international level and individually on a national level, they are tackling a whole range of issues including, reaching agreements with publishers, establishing legal frameworks, meeting end-user access requirements, re-designing workflow processes and developing the necessary digital infrastructure to support this workflow.
NEDLIB was initiated by CoBRA+, a permanent Standing Committee of CENL [1]. The project was launched on January 1, 1998, with funding from the European Commission's Telematics Application Programme, and runs till the end of 2000. Eight national libraries in Europe, one national archive, two ICT organisations and three major publishers are participating in the project. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, leads the project.
NEDLIB, which stands for Networked European Deposit Library, addresses major technical issues confronting national deposit libraries that are in the process of extending their deposit to digital works. The project aims to develop a common architectural framework and basic tools for building deposit systems for electronic publications (DSEP) [2]
The NEDLIB project is reporting regularly to the CENL and CoBRA+ meetings in order to assure feedback on work-in-progress and to address issues arising from this concertation. This proves to be very effective and the relevance of NEDLIB achievements to national libraries has increased because of this.
One important piece of work carried out by the project is the functional specification and overall design of a DSEP. The main objective is to identify functional requirements that are common to all deposit libraries in order to arrive at a "generic" high-level design of a DSEP that can serve as a basis for local implementations by individual deposit libraries.
A common workflow for handling deposited electronic publications was defined and helped to identify common functional requirements. A major step forward in the conceptual design of a DSEP was made in December 1998, when the project consortium agreed to adopt the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model as a Reference Model [3]. During 1999 a DSEP process model and data flow, based on the OAIS model, has been developed. It is tailored to fit within the broader framework of deposit libraries systems.
In the DSEP model the functions of a deposit system are linked into the digital library environment. Much of the OAIS functionality, such as submission (acquisition), description (cataloguing), creating finding aids (the National Bibliography, the library OPAC, subject guides and other indexes), and providing access, is part of the broader digital library configuration. In other words, OAIS functionality bundled in entities such as Ingest, Data Management and Access overlaps the general functionality of a digital library system (DLS). Consequently, the OAIS functionality is situated partly outside and partly inside the actual limits of a DSEP and in the DSEP model the Ingest, Data-Management and Access modules have much more limited functionality than they have in the OAIS Reference Model. Additionally, the NEDLIB model defines how the DSEP system and the digital library system (DLS) interact. Two interfacing modules have been specified through which all input and output interactions with the DSEP take place. Figure 1 shows the result of this scoping exercise.
For a discussion of the DSEP-model please refer to an article on NEDLIB published in the September issue of D-Lib Magazine [4].
 Figure 1: High-level design of a Deposit System for Electronic Publications (DSEP) |
The DSEP model can serve as a starting point for system design. It emphasises ways of building an extensible system whose modules can easily be evolved or replaced. It provides a high-level design of a prototype deposit system that can provide for the preservation of digital publications. The design still needs to be underpinned with architectural guidelines and translated into an appropriate implementation design. This needs to be done at the local level, by deposit libraries individually, taking account of their local requirements and evolving DLS infrastructures. But the DSEP model is a very good starting point for deposit libraries that are in the process of building such a system. In fact the DSEP model already serves this purpose as increasing numbers of deposit libraries are tendering for such systems and involving the ICT-industry in the process. These libraries have all consulted the DSEP model developed by NEDLIB and it has helped them in their specification of requirements to vendors. The libraries concerned include the Koninklijke Bibliotheek who is tendering for a Deposit System for Dutch Electronic Publications [5], the British Library who, likewise, started a European tender for the procurement of a Digital Library System in 1999 [6] and the National Library of Australia who has undertaken several procurement exercises in the past year, based on digital services requirements documented in their Information Paper [7].
In all cases these libraries are not aiming at turnkey solutions. They want to base the overall system on products and services available or currently becoming available in the marketplace. With this strategy they hope to minimise future systems development and operations costs, taking advantage of market-driven technology improvement. At the same time they realise the disadvantage of commercial solutions that follow short-cyclic and market-driven product development paths and that do not outlive the lifetime of the commercial enterprise who designed the product. The libraries therefore intend to implement this strategy by:
NEDLIB hopes to support this strategy by providing guidelines for technical standards and conventions, scorecards for testing the functionality of tools and better insight in the technicalities of long-term preservation.
The NEDLIB standards document is still in development. It takes the list of OAIS-related standards as a starting point and describes standards and conventions that are relevant for a DSEP. The OAIS standardisation efforts are progressing. At an archival workshop on Ingest, Identification and certification standards (AWIICS) that took place in October 1999, three working groups have been installed to look at standards. NEDLIB is also looking at Ingest and Identification and intends to provide feedback to the AWIICS working groups.
Concerning standards for the submission of electronic publications to the DSEP, deposit libraries need to establish digital deposit procedures with publishers, such as file transfer via FTP, harvesting from the web, postal delivery of off-line publications, etc. These procedures should be based on agreements about access permissions, submission schedules, submission package formats. A submission package typically consists of the electronic publication itself and all sorts of additional files, including installation files, structural metadata providing some indication of the way in which the files are inter-related and organised. Some packages may carry just one dissertation, but others may carry several journal issues or even a snap-shot of an Internet domain.
The issue of standardisation of submission is not one of trying to influence the publishing industry to standardise publishing formats, although from a preservation point of view it is arguable that resources created in certain formats will be easier to preserve than others. Deposit libraries will receive publications in the format they were published in. "Standardisation" in this area is dictated by the market-place. However, deposit libraries can make agreements with publishers concerning the submission package. By defining a generic package format it will be possible to process incoming data from a great variety of publishers in a similar way, making the whole ingest process more scalable.
In other areas, standards such as Z39.50 for searching and HTTP/FTP for delivery, are already in use in Digital Library Systems. DSEP does not require specific standards for search and retrieve, but the related standards and techniques for identifying a digital object and resolving the identifier to its location in a library DSEP-system are crucial. The long-term identification, resolution and access to deposited (networked) electronic publications are issues of major concern to deposit libraries [8]. NEDLIB partners, together with other national library experts, are discussing these issues in a CDNL-working-group on permanent naming. Among the CDNL approved principles, the most challenging and far-reaching one is "that memory organisations (such as national libraries) have a responsibility to provide last-resort resolution services for identifiers of cultural heritage resources."
NEDLIB hopes to provide practical guidance to help deposit libraries adhere to this principle: if not direct solutions, at least an extensible list of problems that need to be addressed, such as the necessity to establish rules for usage of identifiers when documents are "processed" for long-time preservation purposes.
Metadata is another area for standards, but again there is much overlap with the broader digital library metadata requirements. NEDLIB does not look into standards for the bibliographic description of electronic publications, which are being developed by established standardisation committees and related projects. NEDLIB addresses metadata in several ways:
NEDLIB is in the process of building a demonstrator system, with tools and software already in use by project partners or developed by NEDLIB, covering all functional aspects of a DSEP. Software and tools are being developed, tested and integrated in functional building blocks of the demonstrator. Existing library systems, such as the online public access catalogue (OPAC) and the library acquisition and cataloguing systems, which are external to, but need to interact with a DSEP, will interface to the demonstrator. During the demonstration stage, which is scheduled for the second half of 2000, the handling of electronic publications from acquisition to access will be demonstrated, with sample material provided by Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers and Springer-Verlag.
Titia van der Werf-Davelaar
Koninklijke Bibliotheek
National Library of the Netherlands
Email: titia@python.konbib.nl
This article is based on the Keynote Speech delivered by Bernard Smith, Head of the Cultural Heritage Applications Unit of the European Commission at World E-com in Perth, Australia on 9th November 1999.
It's been over a decade now since the EU launched an ambitious series of R&D programmes to promote the development of information and communication based technologies, services and applications in Europe. The rationale behind this was the belief that these technologies were going to play an increasingly important role in our society, especially as regards quality of life, industrial competitiveness and the creation of new jobs.
But just supporting R&D alone was no guarantee that the benefits of these technologies will be made available to all our citizens and businesses. Thus our R&D effort was partnered by the launch, in 1987, of an ambitious telecoms liberalisation policy. The aim was to free-up private sector innovation and investment power.
By 1994, and following on from the so-called Delor White Paper, we were able to integrate our liberalisation policy and R&D programmes into a comprehensive package which we in Europe call "The Information Society".
The appropriateness and timeliness of this approach has been confirmed in recent years. Let me illustrate this through a few essential facts and trends:
The development of both information and communication technologies has given birth to the Internet. Over the past five years, this has shown itself to be a powerful and open medium for communication and business. The number of Internet users globally is now around 190 million and will reach 250 million by the end of the year 2000. During the recent Telecom99 conference held in Geneva Larry Ellison of Oracle said that they predicted that Europe would overtake the US in Internet access within the next 4 years. His view was that Europe would be the driving force behind the next generation of wireless e-commerce services, and that within 4 years more users will be accessing the Internet through mobile technology than on fixed-lines. In any case we can certainly expect that at least one third of these 250 million Internet users will be European. To these Internet users we can add the 100 million PCs and 400 million wireless devices world-wide forecast for next year. On top of that we can start to think about the one billion mobile phone users and 500 million Internet users some have predicted by 2003. It is clear now that the future will be a multi-network, multi-device environment delivering a quasi-infinite variety of interactive data-based services over IP.
In five years time, the Internet will be used routinely by half of the European population. This does not necessarily mean that there will be a computer in half the homes in Europe, but access will become commonplace as other devices are used to connect to the Internet. Already access is possible through digital TV set-top boxes, digital assistants and mobile phones. Increasingly this will extend to virtually all consumer appliances such as road navigation systems, house alarms, and why not microwave ovens, refrigerators, and so on. This might not be so far fetched since NTT estimates that by 2010 only one-third of their customers will be people, the rest will be cars, bicycles, portable PCs, boats, vending machines, and even pets. Again during Telecom99 Bill Gates announced that Microsoft was changing its mission statement from "a computer on every desk and in every home" to "empowering users with great software any time, any place, with any device". This can certainly be paraphrased as "the Internet in your pocket" and clearly reflects the shift from today's visible stand-alone PC to tomorrows ubiquitous Internet enabled access device.
Today, information and communication technologies and the Internet have become the most significant factors shaping our economies. This will remain the case for the foreseeable future. The world is clearly moving towards the networked economy.
The Information Society is already the fastest growing sector of the EU economy. The underpinning information and communications industries are growing in Europe at more than 5% points faster than other industrial sectors. Overall the Information Society now accounts for 5% of the EU GDP and 15% of total EU economic growth. In the last 3 years the EU telecoms market has increased by one-third, an increase of 38 billion euro. Last year (1998) the EU mobile communication market grew by 21%, whereas the networking services market grew by 14%, and mobile revenues could well overtake fixed-line revenues in the next 5 years. All this despite the fact that tariffs have dropped by more than 40% over the last 3 years.
The Internet is also the driving force for the rapid emergence of electronic-commerce, which is expected to be worth world-wide 200 billion euro in 2000 and up to 850 billion euro by 2005.
It is therefore vital to our future competitiveness and growth that Europe masters this new context.
Furthermore, the take-up of the Internet and associated information and communication technologies is also vital to solving Europe's employment problem. Already over 4 million people in the EU work in Information Society sectors. The Information Society now creates one out of four new jobs and demand largely outpaces supply. It is estimated that there are more that 500,000 unfilled IT-related job vacancies in the EU, and the gap is expected to widen to 1.2 million jobs by 2002. In fact Mr. Wilson, the CEO of Anderson Consulting, at Telecom99 strongly underlined the fact that new PC companies are no longer being created. He pointed out that mobile and data traffic are the key growth sectors today and that IP-centric start-ups are winning substantial market share and are growing 60% faster than incumbent telecoms operators. At a time where high levels of unemployment remain a major challenge for Europe, these expanding areas represents a potential for job creation that cannot be ignored. For example it is estimated that the GSM market sector could create an additional 150,000 jobs in the coming years. Also the European audio-visual sector is predicted to expand by 70% between 1995 and 2005, creating 300,000 new jobs.
Since I have mentioned several times the Telecom99 conference perhaps it is useful for us to look at some of the key trends seen there. I think most observers would agree that the dominant trend was one of convergence between Internet and mobile communications, or in the words of Mr. Ollila, the CEO of Nokia, "the mobile information society". If wireless Internet access was the major trend then certainly the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was the most attractive technology. Whilst WAP was holding the centre of the stage I think it is also worthwhile mentioning another trend that confirmed itself at Geneva. That is the open-source software model. This is quite a change in the fundamental philosophy of marketplaces. Internet has underlined the importance of openness, with some impressive examples such as Apache, Java and Linux. We are now seeing the effect of this in the way companies are starting to build partnership networks, and finally understanding that no single company can do it all. You will see later in my talk how important this new model is to the research objectives in electronic commerce in the IST programme.
One final observation from Telecom99 was the relative absence of multimedia content providers. They had been very present during Telecom95, and their absence was noted by many in this year's conference. Some speakers, including Bill Gates, predicted that Telecom2003 will be dominated by interactive services and content. Larry Ellison predicted that the explosion of mobile services in Europe would create a major demand for multi-lingual and multi-cultural content. The focus for the future will certainly be on connecting people and not just devices, and on location-sensitive services which by definition will integrate both global and local content. That is to say services with unique cultural and linguistic characteristics. It is sufficient here to note that multimedia content also plays a key role in the IST Programme.
With these observations in mind, I would like to present an overview of our information society policy.
The Information Society concept is about the optimal use of information and communication technologies in all of our activities. As I have already pointed out, our policy aim is to improve Europe's performance in the global economy, as well as to increase the efficiency of public services, leading to greater economic growth, the creation of new jobs and a substantial improvement in the quality of life.
To achieve this, the EU has based its approach on a series of guiding principles:
a) Firstly, creating a favourable legislative environment for businesses and citizens, and:
b) Secondly, supporting research, development and innovation in information and communication technologies.
A cornerstone in this desire for dialogue was the 1997 (6-8 July) Bonn Ministerial Conference. This provided a very valuable final Declaration listing eight key principles to guide Governments action with respect to global information networks:
In that same year the Commission issued a Framework Communication entitled "A European Initiative in Electronic Commerce". The priorities identified in this Communication included those related to liberalisation, regulation and R&D, but added a fourth priority, namely "creating a favourable, open and competitive business environment". Let us look a little more closely at this last priority before returning to the others. The Communication identified four key themes which touch directly on the business environment, namely:
A number of key issues have already been addressed such as data protection, electronic signatures, and so on. The real issue here is consumer confidence in e-commerce processes. "Hard trust" issues are certainly at the heart of many of the actions in the Commissions R&D programmes that I will describe later. Yet this needs to be complimented by softer form of "psychological trust". On this issue much has already been achieved with European industry, trade and consumer associations, but much more is still to be done. The Commissions ISPO Web site is an excellent source of information concerning our awareness building activities. The promotion of e-commerce is also an important task in our R&D programme which I will touch on later.
Experts estimate that, in the US alone, business-to-business e-commerce over the Web will grow from $43 billion in 1998 to $1.3 trillion in 2003. Global e-commerce could reach anything from $3.2 to $5 trillion by 2003, which amounts to between 5% and 7.2% of total world trade. This is dependent upon the creation of complex webs of commercial activities, transacted between a large number of participants, using global open networks. The focus for Europe must thus be on the rapid adoption of e-commerce processes by a large number of small businesses. Programmes such as Commerce 2000 and the G7 project on SMEs have helped to create substantial awareness concerning e-commerce options. Again the ISPO Web site is an excellent source of information on these activities.
It is generally estimated that Europe lags behind the US consumer marketplace by about 18 months. In contrast, in business-to-business applications Europe is already well positioned, and this is where the real marketplace for e-commerce is today. Europe is the worlds leading exporter and is particularly strong in areas such as automotive, aeronautics, tourism, and so on. However, studies have shown that EU companies move into e-commerce to protect their market positions and retain their customers, rather than as a strategic move to capture new markets and consumers. More than 40% of EU companies are influenced by competitors, and they tend to see e-commerce as an add-on activity and are not prepared to commit themselves to the process re-engineering often needed to fully benefit from the available technologies. Many experts feel that it is not so much the cost or technical complexity that is a barrier, nor is it a lack of understanding of the opportunities provided by the technologies, but it is a lack of European specific success stories and "role models". Therefore one key issue here is the creation and showcasing of best practice pilots. Given that individual small companies hesitate to try out new applications, widely publicised pilot projects with detailed business models can be very valuable. Again the Commission's R&D programme has a specific action dedicated to this issue.
The public sector also has an important part to play in the promotion of e-commerce. Interaction with public administrations forms part of the day-today activities of small businesses. In Europe about 70% of the data handled by public administrations has its origins in industry, this covers customs and taxes, social security, employment services, public registry and public procurement. In addition, more than 50% of EU GDP is still generated by governments, local and regional administrations, utilities and public owned companies. Already the IDA programme has focused on the networking interoperability of Europe's public administrations, and the Commission is working to encourage electronic procurement in national administrations. A recent Communication on Access to Public Information also contributes to this debate in offering options for the commercial re-exploitation of publicly held information. The present R&D programme includes a focus on administrations both as providers of services for the citizen, and as enablers and facilitators in business-driven e-commerce processes.
The Commission is very conscious of the fact that European citizens are not yet fully equipped to deal with many of the new technologies on offer. The Information Society Forum clearly placed the emphasis on improving education and network literacy, with a focus on new models for life-long learning. It is clear that the basis for such skills must be laid in primary and secondary schools. Numerous European programmes are already attacking this problem, notably the Socrates and Leonardo programmes for vocational (re-)training, and the structural and regional development funds to promote greater understanding of e-commerce issues by small enterprises. The present R&D programme has a substantial section devoted to education and training and the 2000 work programme will specifically look at the school of tomorrow and the individual learner in society.
Access to the Information Society still remains closely linked to wealth, education and employment. Price is still a significant barrier to entry, and household computer ownership in Europe is still too low. For many people the main route of access in the EU is still the workplace. There is a lack of awareness with those who have the most to gain, notably the elderly, the unemployed, and the handicapped and disabled. Regional disparities are still very marked within the EU, and public access points - for example in libraries, schools and community-based knowledge resource centres - will be central to building an inclusive European Information Society.
The entry into force, on 1 January 1998, of an EU-wide liberalised regulatory framework for telecoms set the essential conditions for the expansion of the communications sector:
Today, the EU telecoms market is a dynamic and rapidly evolving market worth 148 billion euro. It is regarded as the single most important contributor to economic growth in the EU:
In parallel, the telecoms industry is undergoing a major restructuring process:
Overall the EU policy framework is functioning well. However, improvements are necessary. This is the object of a review of the telecoms framework that will be carried out before the end of 1999. The Telecoms Review will cover four key issues:
Let us have a look at some of the problems involved. A good example is licensing. Licensing can work as an obstacle to the development of competition as it can be used to block market entry. Today we have a situation where authorisation regimes differ, so the same operator must adapt its request for authorisation to fifteen different regimes.
In some Member States an operator can start providing services immediately. In others he must seek an individual licence from the regulator. The conditions attached to these licences vary. Such differences constitute obstacles to service provisions by pan-European providers such as satellite operators. This is one reason why most operators remain focused on operating in national markets, rather than seeking to pursue pan-European strategies.
In some cases the regulatory regime is conditioning how an operator provides the service. This can not be right. This is the tail wagging the dog. We need to reduce the red tape so operators are free to innovate. We need to make changes to the framework to encourage more effective competition. In doing so we need also to continue to protect consumers and to guarantee a minimum level of service to the disadvantaged in society.
As I have already said the European Commission will soon issue a policy document that will suggest options to address these shortcomings. Our intention is to hear the views of the national authorities, market players and user associations. In the light of their reactions we will make proposals for a new regulatory framework.>
I hope it is evident that the European Union not only welcomes global competition, but also has now created one of the most open market in the world. If Europe is to be an effective competitor and to have a first-class communications infrastructure then an open market is essential. With the regulatory review the aim will be to create markets that will be even more open.
At the same time as the new telecommunications framework was being implemented in the 15 Member States, the Commission was also undertaking to consolidate the Internal Market for e-commerce, a task which is to be completed in the year 2000.
Very recently the Commission has tabled an amended proposal for a coherent legal framework for electronic commerce in the Single Market. The amendments touch on the definitions of the types of Information Society services and their respective consumers, the link between e-commerce and existing consumer protection and data protection Directives, the treatment of unsolicited commercial communications via e-mail and the determination of the moment when an online contract is concluded. The Commission has kept the proposal to limit the liability of online service providers who act as intermediaries.
All the required Directives have now been tabled and some have already entered into force, for instance those regarding the legal protection of databases and the protection of personal data. Other key Directives concern:
Policy initiatives must reflect the global nature of the Internet and e-commerce. This also calls for globally agreed rules and principles. However this ideal is difficult to achieve for several reasons, primarily:
A new approach at the international level was needed to overcome these difficulties. The Commission's contribution to this new approach was an initiative launched in February 1998:
The GBDe's main aim is to develop business consensus on those priority issues where swift global action is needed. For example, authentication and security; consumer confidence; content; information infrastructure and market access; intellectual property rights; jurisdiction; liability; protection of personal data; taxes and tariffs.
On this basis, recommendations to governments, parliaments and international organisations were tabled by the GBDe at its first conference held in Paris in September 1999:
Given the theme of this conference I think it appropriate to look more closely at some of the more important issues facing Europe. Today we have six problems that need global solutions, namely:
One of the main aspects concerning liability is that of intermediary service providers. The amended EU Electronic Commerce Directive clearly defines four issues, namely:
Protection of privacy is considered a fundamental right and there is already in place a European Directive concerning the protection of personal data. Today the Commission is monitoring its implementation in all Member States. More recently it has been agreed to extend the implementation of the Directive without modification to personal data on the Internet. Concerning the processing of personal data on the Internet the following recommendations have recently been made:
There is an on-going discussion between the EU and the US concerning the ways that complaints from people who have had personal data transferred from the EU should be treated. The EU favours an independent public body or third party organisations for this purpose, and is in discussion with the US concerning the "safe harbour principles" and the role and nature of the associated FAQ.
In May (21 May 1999) of this year an amended proposal for harmonising certain aspects of copyright and related rights was presented. The proposed Directive would establish a level playing field for copyright protection in the new environment. This covers reproduction rights, the communication to the public right, distribution rights, and the legal protection of anti-copying and rights management systems. Throughout the legislative process, the Commission has paid particular attention to ensuring a fair balance between all the rights and interests involved. The amended proposal incorporates fully or partially 44 of the 56 amendments sought by the European Parliament in its 10 February 1999 Opinion. However the Commission did not incorporate the Parliament's suggestion that certain technical acts of reproduction (such as 'cache' copies) should only benefit from an exception to the reproduction right subject to prior authorisation by right-holders to putting their protected material on the networks. This is because such a requirement would have seriously hindered the effective operation of the Internet and upset the balance of interests in the original proposal.
The proposal meets the main requirements of the new international treaties on the protection of authors, performers and phonogram producers agreed in December 1996 by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). This will allow ratification of these treaties by both the European Community as such and the individual Member States, as well as by all countries associated with the EU (including European Economic Area members and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe).>
Concerning taxation and tariffs no official EU position has yet been formulated, however, the issue was discussed at the WTO (GATS, GATT, TRIPS). A product ordered though the Internet and shipped though conventional means is subject to the normal customs regime. The actual method of ordering should not make a difference. The tariffs on a product ordered and delivered through the Internet (for example software) is a complicated question and in May 1998 the World Trade Organisation (WTO) approved an agreement to temporarily refrain from imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions. There are ongoing discussions on the classification of goods that can be delivered both electronically and in a physical form (again the example of software comes to mind).
Whatever the outcome of these on-going discussions it is evident that the solutions must be technologically neutral, efficient to implement, simple to understand and promotes certainty and trust in the minds of all.
An important contribution to the issue of indirect taxation is the 1998 Commission Communication on electronic commerce and indirect taxation. Some of the principles outlined in the communication are:
There is a European Directive on a framework for electronic signatures, which covers considerable ground concerning market access issues, legal implications, liability, data protection and international aspects. The core considerations involve:
Whilst encryption and the specific issue of digital signatures are still treated differently by different Member States in the EU it is now evident that market forces are pushing all parties to adopt similar approaches. It is notable that France, who until recently only permitted a 40-bit encryption technology, recently authorised the use of 128-bit technology. In addition France has announced it intention to lift all restriction and also remove the obligation to deposit encryption keys with Trusted Third Parties. This is seen as being critical in encouraging electronic commerce and Internet usage.
Concerning illegal content the Commission is implementing an Action Plan to promote the safer use of the Internet and to combat illegal and harmful content on global networks. This Plan recognises that, whilst aiming at a high level of protection, any action taken to deal with atypical use for illegal and harmful content should not have a disproportionate impact on Internet users and the industry as a whole. What is fundamentally illegal in the real world is illegal on the Internet. Information on the Internet should be allowed the same free flow as paper-based information. Any restrictions should respect fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and the right to privacy. Responsibility for prosecuting and punishing those responsible for illegal content remains with the national law-enforcement authorities assisted by structures such as EUROPOL and INTERPOL. Industry has a responsibility to remove illegal content from their systems, and can be assisted by self-regulatory bodies. Users should also be able to report illegal content through hotlines. Filtering software and rating systems can help users to avoid harmful contents.
Concerning ongoing actions the EU is working on four initiatives:
On a final issue concerning child pornography a recent international conference in Vienna made some important recommendations, namely:
Another important issue relates to consumer protection. The EU has always maintained that consumer protection should be based upon a small number of basic principles, namely:
Governments, consumer organisations and business representatives all want electronic commerce to flourish. But the technology issues mentioned above concerning service provision, electronic signatures, data protection, and so on, are not enough. For electronic commerce to develop you need at least three things: technology, a suppliers offering goods and services online, and consumers willing to buy goods and services online. Focusing on the last requirement, namely the demand side of the market, it is certain that the key to consumer participation in electronic commerce is consumer confidence. And let us face reality. Consumer confidence in electronic commerce still leaves much to be desired.
The European Commission is guided by a small set of simple rules:
While the previous programme for R&D had been extremely successful, it also showed some shortcomings in the face of the digital revolution. The new Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme has to reflect the political, technological and industrial changes that have taken place since the launch of the previous programme, back in 1994.
Our aim in developing the Fifth Framework Programme was to keep better pace with the changing technological context and take better account of Europe's socio-economic needs. The overall aim of the programme remains intact, and that is to foster collaborative R&D that will help maintenance Europe's position as a leading technological and economic player in the 21st century.
As the frontier between the telecoms, IT and media sectors fades away, the maintenance of three separate programmes focusing on different technologies and sectors was no longer tenable.
Convergence is thus one of the main driving forces behind the integration of all EU IST-related R&D activities into a single programme.
The pace of technological change has increased tremendously over the last years. While the life span of an EU programme is "only" five years, this is already too long to foresee at the outset new challenges that may arise almost overnight.
In order to respond to these challenges in a timely manner, the IST Programme operate on the basis of a rolling work plan, updated annually. Furthermore there will be frequent calls for proposals - two or three each year. New actions can therefore be easily and quickly launched as and when required, while existing actions can be more easily reoriented to reflect new developments.
Because the technological landscape is changing so rapidly today we have decided not to create a too narrow or deterministic techno-centric focus for the programme. The IST Programme thus has as a focus the substantial and measurable improvement of key system functionalities, namely accessibility, affordability, usability, dependability, and interoperability.
In addition, very recently a high-level advisory group has provided a long-term vision for the IST Programme. This vision is based upon the model of an intelligence landscape of seamlessly interwoven services and applications. The practical focus is on large test-beds and open source software, developing non-trivial aspects of user friendliness, and a world-class network infrastructure. What should emerge is a future environment that is embedded, personalised, adaptive and anticipatory.
At the end of the day, R&D activities should lead to new products and services. R&D must contribute to strengthen all sectors of EUindustry and in particular our infrastructure of small and medium sized enterprises. The key indicators of success are market share, global competitiveness and the number of new jobs created.
The IST Programme will therefore place strong emphasis on the take-up of EU R&D results. This includes, in particular, actions supporting the development and diffusion of new methods, techniques and the associated skills required, such as first-user and best-practice actions).
This will be accompanied by consensus-building and standardisation activities, which have proved extremely successful in the past, for instance for GSM and digital TV.
The IST Programme must also reflect economic globalisation. Hence the importance devoted to the international dimension of EU research. It is useful here to mention the role of international co-operation in the IST Programme. At this moment in time the programme is completely open to the 15 Member States, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Israel and 11 accession states including most the Central and Eastern European countries. Switzerland will also become a full participant in 2001. In addition there are Science & Technology Agreements with USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and so on. Finally all the RTD programmes are now open to international co-operation on a project-by-project basis.
Finally - and this is in fact an underlying element of the previous points I have just made - EU research must be more closely related to EU policy goals. To achieve this is even more important today than it was in the past, given the fast and widespread penetration of technologies in all aspects of human life.
In practical terms, it means that the research objectives of the IST Programme reflect the political priorities of both Information Society policy and other key EU policies, for instance employment, education and training, health, environment, transport, cohesion or sustainable development.
The new IST Programme has a budget of 3.6 billion euro until 2002, and the budget for 1999 is around 800 million euro. It is focused on four key actions and two horizontal activities:
Key Action I - "Systems and services for the citizen"
Key Action II - "New methods of work and electronic commerce"
Key Action III - "Multimedia content and tools"
Key Action IV - "Essential technologies and infrastructures"
Horizontal Action 1 - "Future and emerging technologies"
Horizontal Action 2 - "Research networking"
Realising the vision behind the IST Programme presents many technical challenges and standardisation problems. The overall aim is the development and application of new technologies in competitive products and services. The Work Programme for 2000 is focussed on these challenges and in particular:
From the technology perspective:
From the application and services perspective:
In addition, these priorities are complemented by policy oriented objectives, essentially:
In terms of electronic commerce the core activities in the IST programme are found in the Key Action entitled "New Methods of Work and Electronic Commerce". I would like here to focus on two specific issues, action promoting the adoption of e-commerce technologies and practices, and R&D on security and confidence building technologies.
The 2000 work programme is likely to have a strong focus on activities promoting adoption and exploitation of e-commerce technologies and practices. The aim will be to foster the rapid exploitation of research results by providing funds for "trials" and "test-beds". The objective here is to strengthen Europe's technology base for the digital economy by validating and customising novel solutions in very practical situations so that the marketplace can quickly adopt them. An additional action will focus on "best practice" activities aimed at showcasing the benefits of new solutions and facilitating their deployment within small enterprises.
Turning to the challenge to develop novel IST-based solutions and practices is to ensure trust and confidence both at the level of individual solutions as well as at the level of the infrastructures supporting these solutions. The focus is on:
A particular action is focused on large-scale trust test-beds which examine generic solutions for global interoperability and supporting a broad array of transactions (for example, e-purses and e-money), applications and business processes.
This last point was just to demonstrate that today the Commissions RTD programme is not only highly focused on key technological challenges but also on ones that have global relevance. It is for this reason that the IST Programme is an excellent tool for a modern policy in international co-operation.
In conclusion, the development and effective uptake of Information Society Technologies will be one of the key issues for the European economy in the coming years.
The European Commission, through an extensive and integrated policy, aims to foster the emergence of the Information Society in Europe. The Information Society industries have become one of biggest and fastest growing sectors in the EU. They are creating new jobs, new business opportunities, new products and services, but this is only the beginning. We can expect that these industries will grow in importance, and that the pace of change will continue to accelerate and challenge existing structures and institutions.
In addition to telecoms deregulation and the development of an appropriate regulatory framework, e-commerce is one of the lynchpins of the Commission's strategy in the IST programme. The EU is well placed to exploit the opportunities on offer. We have the largest single market in the world, the single currency, a liberalised telecoms infrastructure, a well structured regulatory framework, and a diverse, creative and innovative pool of talent.
More specifically by fostering collaborative R&D projects, the IST programme helps to bring together Europe's brightest researchers to develop new technologies for the next generation of e-commerce products and services.
Today our problems are global, so it is important that our programmes are as open as possible to collaboration with non-EU partners. We are making progress in this area, but there is still much to do. I would incite you all to consider or re-consider your options, and come and talk to us about future co-operation.
Thank you
Bernard Smith
Head of Unit
Cultural Heritage Applications INFSO/D
Directorate General - Information Society
European Commission
Steve Coffman, Director of FYI at the County of Los Angeles Public Library gives a European perspective on his ideas for Building Earth's Largest Library.
In March of last year I wrote an article for Searcher Magazine called “Building Earth's Largest Library.” (for full text see [1] and a follow-up piece at [2]). The basic premise of the piece was to apply the business model of Amazon.com, the bellwether of the new e-commerce revolution, to the library world. For example, what if we scrapped our limited local online public access catalogs (OPACs) that list only books in our own collections? What if, instead, we adopted a catalog like Amazon's, one that would show our patrons not only all the books we had, but also all of those we could get — either through interlibrary loan or in-print titles we could purchase for our patrons, if demand warranted it?
Suppose that when a patron searched this new catalog, they received a list of all the books available along with some indication of how long it would take to get them — just as they do in Amazon. And what if, like Amazon, we provided our patrons with rich bibliographic records showing cover art, tables of contents, synopses, excerpts, author biographies, reviews, etc., instead of forcing them to make do with the skimpy little, uninformative MARC records that make up our current catalogs? And suppose we allowed our patrons to order any book they wanted out of this catalog right on the Web, and have it delivered to their local library or directly to their home or office, from anywhere in the world, just like Amazon?
If we could accomplish all of that, we would have created the single largest library that has ever existed on the face of the earth — a library containing over 43 million titles (assuming a catalog equivalent to a combination of OCLC's Worldcat database plus the current Bowker Books In Print), almost ten times the collection of the 4.5 million titles listed in Amazon's own catalog of Earth's Biggest Bookstore. Such a library would make us the center of book information on the Web, and prove, once and for all, that when it comes to books, nobody, but nobody can beat the library.
Or at least that is what I said in the article. And judging from the large and generally enthusiastic response the piece has received in the United States, there are many who love the idea and can't wait to get started building it.
However, the vote was not unanimous. A number of people — particularly from your side of the Atlantic — suggested that a more accurate title for the article would have been “Building America's Largest Library” because while the model I laid out might have worked alright in the U.S., it would do little to help a patron in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, or almost anywhere outside the U.S. Others complained that it was unrealistic to assume that libraries from different countries could cooperate sufficiently to develop a single union catalog of their works, when experience in Europe had shown that they could not even agree on a common set of cataloging conventions. Some of you pointed out that interlibrary lending policies and procedures differed from country to country in Europe, and that even if you could make a catalog that could show a patron in Germany titles held by libraries in Italy or the U.S., it still would not be easy to request them. Others noted that I had totally ignored the language problem. Finally, several suggested that Amazon itself was a uniquely American creation, and questioned whether European customers would really want to adopt the same approach.
To each of these charges, save one, I plead guilty. I did write the article from a decidedly U.S. perspective. I built the model around tools like OCLC's WorldCat and Bowker Books In Print, that only work well in the U.S. (OCLC does offer some European coverage, but it is hardly comprehensive). And even though, I called it Earth's Largest Library I'm afraid the model I proposed for the U.S. might prove of little use to patrons in Frankfurt, Bath, Venice, Orleans, or Warsaw.
Having made that confession, however, I still disagree with those who claim that Earth's Largest Library or the Amazon model in general somehow could not apply to Europe. After all, Amazon itself has created two very popular sites directed exclusively at European audiences in the UK [3] and Germany [4]. And as far as I can tell, every major European online bookstore that I have visited from Bertelsmann [5] to Waterstones [6] and WH Smith Online [7] in the UK and FNAC in France [8] seems to have closely copied the Amazon model in designing their sites. They each strive to offer as broad a selection of titles as possible, including both books they hold in inventory and titles they can order from elsewhere, and each includes as much detail on each title as they can get, including cover art, tables of contents, synopses, reviews, customer comments, and anything else they can get their hands on.
Based on this evidence, the features pioneered by Amazon would seem as important to European customers as to those in the U.S. So the real question is not whether European patrons would appreciate a library catalog fashioned after the Amazon model, but rather how to create such a catalog within the complex environment of the European community. Clearly, Europe does present some special difficulties, but I don't think the problems are insurmountable, particularly in light of the strong tradition of cooperation among many European libraries. And if Europe's librarians could pull it off, you could establish very real benefits for libraries and library patrons all over Europe.
So, how would we build Earth's Largest Library in Europe? Let's look at the pieces and see how we might fit them together.
First off, let's not call it Earth's Largest Library, that would only encourage somebody from South America or Africa or Asia to write in and complain that it didn't apply to them. Instead, let's call it Europe's Largest Library or ELL, for short. ELL would aim to provide library patrons all over Europe with a single catalog where they could find information about books, videos, periodicals, and other intellectual property, available (1) at their local library, (2) at other libraries throughout Europe either via interlibrary loan or by visits to those libraries, or (3) available for purchase (“in-print” books) by the library should patron demand warrant.
ELL's new catalog would be a big, rich; wonderful catalog with user-friendly information supplementing the skimpy MARC records, enough information to help patrons choose what they want. The interfaces would make the catalog easy to use. They would correct misspellings automatically, recommend books based on previous borrowing habits, allow users to recommend books to friends, provide lists of books appropriate for particular age levels and lists of books that have won awards, and provide all the many other amenities developed by our friends on the commercial side.
Amazon originally built their catalog around Baker & Talylor's Title Source II database, which included “enhanced bibliographic records” with cover art, tables of contents, etc. for selected titles, and inventory records of books available from other selected suppliers. Amazon then added in reviews, customer comments, the recommendation engine, and other features, to produce their single union catalog of over 4.5 million records. In the original Earth's Largest Library article, I suggested that libraries could achieve a similar effect by creating a union catalog that combined a source of current in print bibliographic information like the Baker & Taylor database or Bowker's Books In Print, plus a catalog of books held by other libraries available through interlibrary loan, such as the OCLC WorldCat database.
Of course, neither the U.S.-focused Books In Print nor its equivalents, nor the OCLC database would do much good in Europe. However, similar sources of information exist for most European countries. Why not take advantage of them?
We could get current bibliographic data from any of the various “In Print” catalogs such as British Books in Print, Spain's Libros en Venta, Germany's Verzeichnis lieferbarer Bücher for Germany, and the like. In many countries, we could license large retail and wholesale catalogs already in existence to produce current bibliographic records, for example, the Book Data database, or the Waterstones, WH Smith, or Amazon.uk catalogs for the UK, and the Bertelsmann catalog for the UK and much of the rest of Europe. And if we wait a while longer, we might someday acquire detailed records on current titles directly from the publishers themselves, as Amazon already does. Many publishers are working hard to come up with an international standard for bibliographic information that would allow them to easily transfer catalog and book data directly to wholesalers, retailers, and libraries via EDI or electronic data interchange. And if these efforts bear fruit --- and there is every reason to suspect they will --- publishers may soon be providing much of the basic bibliographic information in our catalogs. For further information on European initiatives in this area see [9].
Creating a union catalog of works held by other libraries throughout Europe would be a little more difficult. There really is no direct equivalent of the OCLC WorldCat database for Europe as a whole. To extend the Earth's Largest Library concept to Europe, we would have to build one or something very similar from the ground up.
As a start, we should combine existing national union catalogs, bibliographies, and other tools which each country has developed to keep track of their national bibliographies and to help locate titles for interlibrary loan. I know — just from the brief investigation I have done — that these sources differ from country to country. Some countries have developed comprehensive online union catalogs; in other cases, even two or three major sources will still not cover everything. And, of course, formats differ for various bibliographic records (although not as seriously as they might, thanks to International Standard Bibliographic Description).
Probably the biggest problem is the lack of complete holdings information in some of these databases, including omission of some libraries. To plug these gaps, we would have to design a way for libraries to add their local holdings to the catalog — probably by matching their local OPAC records against the titles in the national catalogs. But these differences are not insurmountable. With a little thought and hard work, we could build a source that would serve as a WorldCat for Europe. It wouldn't be perfect, of course, but then, neither is OCLC.
When operational, we would have a single source that would allow the patron to easily determine what books were available in his library had and what books were available to him at other libraries elsewhere in the country and throughout Europe. For a good example of how you might structure something like this, have a look at the Bertelsmann's BOL.com site [10] that offers an online catalog that currently covers books in seven European countries and in six different languages. The site operates off a single database and transaction system with a consistent user interface across all of the countries that makes the catalog easy to deal with, even if you are not fluent in the language. You can only search one country at a time, but you can switch from country to country just by clicking a link.
It is not hard to imagine a similar interface for the ELL catalog. Patrons could access the catalog at their local library or on the Web through their library's Web site. They would start by searching for books in their own library and their own country, receiving a list similar to what you find in Bertlesmann or Amazon., e.g. “This title is available on the shelf at your library,” “This title is available through interlibrary loan and ships within 24-48 hours,” “This title is available through interlibrary loan and ships in 1-2 weeks,” and so forth. Patrons who did not find what they sought in their own country could simply click a link on the Web site to check the catalog in another country, just as they can at the Bertelsmann site.
Once we have all the book listings in a single catalog, how can we move the real books around? As part of the basic research for this piece, I wrote to librarians all across Europe and asked them how a patron would go about getting a book not in their local library collection. I learned that each country does things a little differently. The UK has a large centralized national supply system under the BLDSC. Italy has a national union catalog with decentralized supply. Sweden has separate networks for public and research libraries, each with its own set of finding tools and requesting procedures. Belgium also has separate catalogs for public and research libraries, but coupled to a national ordering system and a standardized fee schedule; some Belgian libraries have begun experimenting with direct patron-initiated requests. ILL systems differ from country to country. Possibly there are some very good reasons for the differences, but even if not, it would be the height of folly to assume that you could easily persuade any country to give up its own ILL system and adopt another.
What we need then, is a catalog with an interlibrary loan “mechanism” flexible enough to accommodate all of the different ILL models currently used by libraries throughout Europe — plus some yet to be devised. We need an ELL catalog that can be customized to fit the needs of each library.
Once we have built the “national union catalog” for Europe with holdings information for all participating libraries, everything else about that catalog — from the way availability information is displayed for the patron, to the way ILL requests are taken, to the way they are routed among libraries — could all be customizable and configurable to fit the needs of different countries and different libraries. For example, a public library in Sweden might configure the catalog so it would first try to borrow from Swedish public libraries, then from Swedish academic libraries, then from other Nordic countries, then perhaps from the BDLSC, and finally from any country in Europe with which Sweden had an interlibrary lending agreement. On the other hand, an academic library in the UK might configure the system to first try the BLDSC, and if unavailable, then other academic libraries on the Continent, other European public libraries, and so forth.
Somewhere along line somebody has to pay for these loans, so we would also need a flexible accounting system that allowed libraries to keep track of how much they owed whom, how much others owed them, and to pass some or all of those costs along to the patron if they so chose. None of this is easy, but none of it is rocket science either. In fact all the features outlined here have already long been available in the OCLC interlibrary loan system, and many others.
Of course, all of the complexities of interlibrary loan would be totally transparent to the patron. Few patrons care about library routing processes or where a book comes from. Most only want to know whether the title is available and how long it will take to get it. If the library permitted, patrons could click on a button and fill in their library card identification to request a book online, or perhaps the site would advise them to come in to the library to place their order. Of course, some patrons might actually want to travel to the owning library to use the book rather then requesting it on loan — either because the book was not available on loan in the first place (reference titles, special collections, etc.), or for personal convenience. Whatever the case, the patron should be able to click a button on the bibliographic record to find out what libraries held the item (complete with opening hours, maps and driving directions) and any special conditions for getting access to it. If the British Library held the title, for example, you would want to let the patron know that they would have to apply for a Reader's Ticket to use the item in the building.
The system we propose here would result in a pretty sizeable increase in demand for interlibrary loan, both because of improved information for patrons and easier ordering mechanisms. Of course it costs money to move books around (each ILL transaction in the United States costs around $28.00 according to the most recent statistics from the Association of Research Libraries). Some people question whether something like Earth's Largest Library would be economically viable, whether libraries — or their patrons, for that matter — could really afford to pay the increased costs of all those additional interlibrary loans requests that would arise if we ever really let patrons know what was available to them --- and allowed them to request it. However, good evidence exists that says we pay more now than we should to handle ILL requests. Many commercial wholesalers, for example, can pick, pack, and ship a book for less than $2.00 per item --- less than 10% of what it costs ARL libraries to perform the same task. The negative arguments also assume that books will remain physical items that will cost somebody something to move around. However, many people in the book trade now predict that in the near future, books will be stored as digital objects for delivery in a variety of different ways — printing on demand, downloading in whole or part for single or multiple use, etc. all depending on what the patron wants and how much he --- or perhaps his library --- wants to pay.
Terms and conditions for access to various formats may depend, at least in part, on library memberships. For an early example, see NetLibrary at http://www.netlibrary.com. NetLibrary supplies electronic version of books to university libraries on a subscription basis. Even though the library owns the title, the actual digital copy does not exist in the local collection at all; it is housed somewhere on the NetLibrary servers in Colorado. Students and faculty at a subscriber institution can access NetLibrary titles from anywhere on the Web, because their library subscribes to it. If we follow this trend out, we can see two things … first, as books become digital, the cost of delivering them to the reader will drop sharply, second, in the future the function of the catalog will not be to show what is in a local collection ---because we don't really care where the digital copy of the work is stored, but rather to show whether a particular book exists anywhere in the world, and if it does, to show the reader how to get access to it.
So, while Europe's Largest Library would probably result in increased demand for ILL and some increased costs in the short term, in the long run it would seem exactly the kind of catalog we will need to deal with the brave new world of digital publishing and digital collections.
Something else interesting happens when you build this kind of catalog and put this technology to work … it begins to affect all kinds of other functions in the library as well.
For example, if we had one great catalog with one rich bibliographic record for each title, why would we want to continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (or choose the currency you prefer) paying thousands of catalogers and technical services staff to add those skimpy little MARC records to our local catalogs? And why pay millions of dollars more on systems and software ---like Z39.50---trying to retrieve all those little records from our local systems? Instead, we would spend less time and money overall by working to create one, big, fat, rich bibliographic record for each title and then making that record accessible to all libraries over the Web. And if, as I have suggested, that catalog also includes records for current “books in print” not held by any library, then cataloging a book would simply be a matter of attaching the library's holding information to the appropriate bibliographic record — already waiting in the catalog. Books would be cataloged as they were purchased, eliminating cataloging backlogs. In most libraries, cataloging would become a simple part of the acquisitions process.
This doesn't mean, of course, that we would throw thousands of catalogers out of work. On the contrary, the ELL catalog would need their services more than ever, to help build the new catalog, to locate and compile the content added to the bibliographic records, to handle authority control and assign the best subject headings, and to build browsing categories in the catalog that arranged books in ways we have never had the time to arrange them before. This would require a lot of catalogers and cost a good deal of money, but in the long run, we would build a catalog like none our patrons had ever seen before, and the work our catalogers did would be available for all to use, not squandered trying to maintain skeletal records in some puny local system.
A centralized catalog would also help us spend our collection development money a lot more judiciously.
Up until now, collection development practices in libraries have not been terribly efficient. We've had to guess at what our patrons might want and because it was difficult and time consuming to get books from outside the local collection, we had buy a lot of material just in case people might want it. As a result, a high percentage of our collections sit on the shelf, while a small percentage of our books account for most of our circulation.
The catalog we design here would offer us an opportunity to change all of that. In the first place, if we included information on current “in print” titles in the catalog, we could allow patrons to play a role in collection development. We could call it “patron-centered collection development.” If a library patron found a title in the catalog the library did not own --- but which was available for purchase — they could click on a button on the bibliographic record to suggest the library purchase it. If we got one of these suggestions on a title, we might not pay too much attention to it. But if we received two or three or four patron recommendations on a title, we would consider purchasing it.
Moreover, if we had a huge catalog and could guarantee our patrons quick delivery of many titles, it would allow us to tailor our local collections more closely to patron demand. We could move away from “just in case” collection development to “just in time” collection development We could focus our collections on the items needed to meet immediate demand ...such as material needed for school assignments, material unique to our community and not readily available elsewhere, more copies of most frequently circulated books, and more books in high demand subject areas. Then we would rely on the interlibrary loan system to deliver less frequently requested titles. Of course, the catalog would also show us what books people borrowed heavily from outside libraries and suggest what we should add to our own collection.
I'm not suggesting that we design our collections totally around patron demand … otherwise you might end up with thousands of copies of the latest best seller, and nothing on organic chemistry. However, this sort of system would allow us to focus our collections more closely on the needs of patrons, and help insure that fewer of the titles we purchased sat idly on the shelf gathering dust.
Finally, if we had all of our bibliographic records in one catalog, why would we need to develop and maintain any more than one circulation system? After all, Amazon handles millions and millions of sales from millions and millions of customers from all over the world with a single transaction system. So why spend millions and millions of pounds, deutchmarks, francs, dollars, and lire on thousands of expensive local circulation systems that don't work very well anyway.
Better to make one good system that everybody could use and make it available over the Internet on a subscription basis. A great example of this is the BookSense program which the American Booksellers Association is launching this Spring [10]. It has a single catalog and transaction system like Amazon's, but is available to any independent bookseller on a subscription basis. So far over one thousand bookstores have signed up for the program. Libraries could do something very similar with a centralized catalog and circulation system.
The system should include at least circulation and acquisitions functions, but might also include other features commonly found in integrated library systems as well. Your patron database and holdings records could be maintained locally in the interest of privacy ... but the software that acted upon that data would come from the Net.
We could also toss out most all of the local hardware and software we now use to run out local systems as well. About the only thing we would need are terminals or PCs linked to the Net. Without the hardware and software to maintain, we would need far fewer local systems staff than we currently employ.
Of course, all of this would be optional. A library could still maintain their local circulation system if they wanted to and just tie the ELL catalog to it. But in the long run, I predict that most libraries would opt for the Web-based circulation system to take advantage of the great cost savings. Let me show you what I mean. According to the most recent Library Journal survey, the current library automation market is worth about $475 million dollars per year — and that just represents the money paid to the automation vendors, it does not include the millions of additional dollars spent on hardware, systems staff, telecommunications costs, and other things needed to keep local systems up and running. If we added that on, there is little doubt that we would be dealing with a total figure many times the figure that LJ quotes.
Now let's contrast that figure with what it costs some well-known and heavily trafficked Internet sites to maintain their catalogs and transaction systems. According to Amazon's Annual Report in 1997 (I used the 1997 report because at that time Amazon was still primarily a bookstore with costs more directly comparable to ours), Amazon spent $12.4 million on their catalog and circulation systems and that included all their hardware, software, content, and telecommunications charges plus the salaries of all the staff needed to develop and maintain it. During that same period they handled about 20-25 million sales, far more than the circulation of any single library, but still well below the 1.6 billion circulations of all U.S. libraries, to say nothing of volume in the rest of the world. So, just for good measure I thought we could add in the cost of the Ebay catalog which handles about 350 million transactions at $11.4 million per year, and the Yahoo sites which costs $49.9 million per year to run and gets about 61 billion pages views per year … and who knows how many billions of transactions.
Now lets assume that a Web-based automation system with sufficient capacity to handle the traffic from most of libraries in the U.S. and Europe would cost as much as all three of these Internet sites put together — or a grand total of 73.2 million dollars per year. That figure is still less than 20% of the $475 million libraries are spending on library automation software alone. Assuming we divide those costs equally among the 9700 libraries in the U.S., we would get an annual cost of $7,546.39 per library. If we factor the European libraries into the equation, the cost per library would drop even lower. Now, I know these figures are a little loose, but they are the best we can do right now without actually sitting down and carefully costing out the whole system, but even if things costs 2 or 3 or even 10 times as much as we've estimated here, we would still save money and get a far better catalog and circulation system.
If these calculations are right, there is little doubt that the Amazon model has the potential to improve the efficiency and reduce the costs of a number of key library operations. But the real winners with Europe's Largest Library would be our library patrons themselves. The scholars, students, business people, hobbyists, mothers, fathers, children, and millions upon millions of other users who pay our salaries and rely upon us to get them the information they need. Where now their library catalogs show them only what is available in local collections, ELL would allow them to select from several hundred million titles available in libraries throughout Europe. Where today we force them to puzzle over cryptic MARC records that do little more than identify the book, the ELL catalog would provide them with rich bibliographic entries that told them something about the book and its author, offer reviews, and supply enough information about the title to help them determine if they wanted to read it or not. And whereas, today, most of our patrons must come down to the library to use a catalog or check out a book, this catalog would be available on the Web 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, for access by our patrons from their homes, offices, day care centers, dorm rooms, or any other place with Internet access.
Finally, with a potential inventory of several hundred million titles Europe's Largest Library would be the single largest source of book information on the Web, far surpassing the modest collections of even the largest of the online bookstores. It would be a living flesh and blood incarnation of the ideals of Universal Bibliographic Control and Universal Availably of Publications, which we librarians have worked so hard to achieve for so many years. It would be the place people turned to first when they needed information on books. And it would prove once and for all that for access to the world's collected works on literature, science, history, fiction, or almost subject area known to mankind, nobody, but nobody, could beat the library — Europe's Largest Library.
Now, I'm something of an optimist, but even I recognize the many potential problems and obstacles that we would have to overcome to create anything as radical as this proposal. But what if, in the end, we couldn't solve these problems and overcome these obstacles. What will happen then?
The answer is nothing. The catalog will still be created. It only makes sense. As we discussed earlier in this piece, as books move over to digital format, the whole concept of a local library catalog quickly becomes an anachronism. Companies like Amazon and other online booksellers have certainly shown us what kind of bibliographic records our patrons prefer. Somebody soon will make the large and rich catalog along the lines we have described here. It may not have all the holdings of all the libraries in Europe, but it will have a lot of books, and those books will be described in lengthy, detailed records that will make our patrons happy.
The only difference will be that it won't be us that makes that catalog. It will be Amazon or Bertelsmann, or perhaps a library wholesaler like Baker & Taylor, or a library automation company like Innovative Interfaces. And whatever commercial company does the job we didn't do, will be the one we buy our library catalog information from someday, just as we now buy our periodical cataloging and indexing from commercial sources. That's all right, I guess. After all, we will still have the catalog. The problem is that we will cede all control over what is in it and how it is made. And the proud tradition of library cataloging which began in Europe with Panizzi and the British Library Catalog will disappear with a whimper, not a bang.
Of course, the future does not have to look like that. We can take the initiative and redesign our library catalog to provide our patrons with what they want — while honoring the best elements of traditional bibliographic control. But if we are not equal to this task, others stand willing to do it for us, though they may not share all our values. The choice is clear. The game is ours to lose.
Steve Coffman
Director, FYI
County of Los Angeles Public Library
12350 Imperial Highway
Norwalk, CA 90650
USA
Steve Coffman is the Director of FYI, the fee-based business information service
of the County of Los Angles Public Library. Steve as been with the service ever
since it was first launched back in 1989, and over the years, he and the staff
at FYI have developed some pretty innovative approaches to providing reference
and research services in public libraries-even if they have to say so themselves.
Some of these innovations include:
Steve and his crew are currently working with a number of libraries on a major project to develop live reference services over the Web, using Web Contact Center software such as that featured on the Lands End site - see <http://www.landsend.com/>. The first of these reference applications should begin to appear on the Web sometime in late Spring of 2000.
When Steve is not busy trying to keep these balls in the air, he writes occasional pieces for the library trades, including "Building Earth's Largest Library," "Reference as Others Do it" and the highly controversial "What If You Ran Your Library Like a Bookstore". He is the Editor, of ALA's Internet Plus Directory of Express Library Services, (a directory of libraries offering services on the Internet), and serves as impresario and program developer for the Southern California Online Users Group. Steve got his MLS from UCLA back in 1985, and has a B.A. in foreign languages from San Francisco State University. He lives with his wife Susan and daughter Kirsten, along with a couple of roadrunners, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and other varmints in the sage-covered hills north of Los Angeles.
Klaus Reinhardt reports on the establishment of an accompanying measure under the Fifth Framework Programme in the field of digital cultural heritage applications (IST Program), the new "anchor" for libraries, archives and museums.
Under the Third and Fourth Framework Programmes a network of National Focal Points (NFPs) was established in all EU Member States and most of the associated states for the Telematics for Libraries Programme. In the Fifth Framework Programme, which began recently, the structure has changed. The "old" Telematics Programme is part of the Information Society Technology Programme (IST) - and there is no longer a "libraries area". The only place you can find the word "libraries" (together with archives and museums) in the IST Programme is in Key Action III: Multimedia Content and Tools, sub-area Digital Content and Cultural Heritage.
CULTIVATE is the answer for the need for a newly structured network supporting the co-operation of archives, libraries and museums under the Fifth Framework Programme. This network is planned to have two parts: CULTIVATE-EU for the western part of Europe and CULTIVATE-CEE for the ten accession countries in Central and Eastern Europe. CULTIVATE-EU has been positively evaluated and negotiated. It will start its 36 months lifetime in February 2000. CULTIVATE-CEE is expected following some months later.
CULTIVATE-EU will establish a European Cultural Heritage Network consisting of 15 partners based in 12 European countries. It will continue the successful and fruitful work carried out by the National Focal Points for the Telematics for Libraries Programme under the Third and Fourth Framework Programmes and will expand it to all memory institutions, namely archives, museums and galleries.
The network intends:
After setting up the CULTIVATE-EU national nodes with representatives from relevant memory institutions and organisations in each participating country these nodes and their Web presence will be linked. The dissemination of information will be supported by an electronic information service at European level and by the production of sector specific information material in printed and electronic form. To reflect the state-of-the art of cultural heritage applications in Europe as well as to present and to discuss the results achieved by CULTIVATE-EU an electronic web-based magazine will be developed. All partners will be responsible for (EU non-costed) sector specific information days and consultancy tasks for (potential) proposers. Activities linking European Cultural heritage policy and directives to administrative and professional bodies at national level will bridge the gap between the thematic work on European and on national level. A close co-operation with national nodes of Western European countries not participating in the CULTIVATE-EU consortium and institutions of the ten CEE accession countries is an essential part of the measure. The accompanying measure will be managed by the DBI, (German Libraries Institute) as the co-ordinating partner.
Details of the Consortium members are given in the following table.
| Participant name | Participant short name | Country | Status * |
| Deutsches Bibliotheksinstiut | DBI | DE | C |
| The Library Council | CL | IRL | P |
| Institute for Learning and Teaching Research Technology, University of Bristol (third partner assistance to CL) | ILRT | UK | S |
| Library and Information Commission | LIC | UK | P |
| University of Bath / UK Office for Library and Information Networking | UKOLN | UK | P |
| Cultural Service Centre Austria | CSC Austria | A | P |
| Riksbibliotektjenesten | RBT | NO | P |
| Biblioteca Nacional | BN | E | P |
| Osservatorio dei programmi internazionali per le biblioteche | OPIB | IT | P |
| Fundo de Fomento Cultural / Conselho Superior de Bibliotecas | FFC | P | P |
| Kungl.biblioteket | KB | S | P |
| University of Helsinki / Helsinki University Library | HUL | FIN | P |
| Federal Office for Scientific, Technical and Cultural Affairs | OSTC | B | P |
| Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs | MINERA | EL | P |
| Subdireccion General de los Archivos Estatales | SGAE | E | P |
| Subdireccion General de los Museos Estatales | SGME | E | P |
*C = Co-ordinator P - Principal contractor S - Sub-contractor
The European dimension of the accompanying measure can be seen from its working structure. DBI, Berlin, (German Libraries Institute) will be the coordinating partner and the national node for Germany. All the other partners (excluding UKOLN, UK Office for Library and Information Networking) are national nodes for Cultural Heritage Applications in their countries and will coordinate activities in their national network. They will also be active in a cooperation at a European level.
Some of the national nodes are also leading partners for tasks of European dimension:
Another participant is ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol, UK) which is a sub-contractor of The Library Council, Ireland which is responsible for providing the main CULTIVATE web service.
The information work to be carried out at European level consists of five main tasks:
The DBI, the coordinator of the accompanying measure EXPLOIT in the Telematics for Libraries Programme, will be responsible for the overall management of CULTIVATE-EU. UKOLN already runs the web magazines Ariadne [1] and Exploit Interactive [2] and is now going to publish an web magazine on "European Archives, Libraries and Museums Matters" including the provision of the technical and administrative infrastructure. LIC runs a highly successful electronic mailing list named "lis-european-programmes" [3] with nearly 400 members from nearly every European country. LIC will therefore have the task to establish and operate an European electronic mailing list for information dissemination, partner finding and discussion for the cultural heritage sector. CSC have a very strong information technology competence and will therefore be responsible for the development and agreement of standardisation issues for the common electronic information services. The ILRT (subcontractor to The Library Council, Ireland) has an excellent track record of co-operation with other universities and especially with industrial partners in the development of leading-edge network products and will therefore develop a web-based european-wide information service for the CULTIVATE-EU network. RBT, Norway will bring in their contacts to European and international associations, organisations and institutions relevant to the archives, libraries and museums sector for linking them to European policy. All other participating institutions will be involved in national tasks such as organising information days for proposers and the provision with information material for the expected calls for proposals.
All remaining western European countries not covered by the project consortium have been invited to cooperate with CULTIVATE-EU as associated partner. Interest has already been expressed by institutions from Denmark, France, Iceland, Netherlands and Switzerland.
A proposal for an accompanying measure for the development of a comparable network in the CEE countries (co-ordinated by The British Council) has also been submitted. Both activities were planned together and will work in a close co-operation.
CULTIVATE will continute the initiatives began by the NFPs and the EXPLOIT project under the Telematics for Libraries Programme. In particular Exploit Interactive will operate parallel to the CULTIVATE web magazine in 2000, focused on Telematics for Libraries information. The CULTIVATE web magazine will concentrate on the work under the Fifth Framework Programme in the field of Cultural Heritage. From 2001 it is likely that the CULTIVATE web magazine will replace Exploit Interactive and continue the information dissemination.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Klaus Reinhardt
Deutsches Bibliotheksinstitut
German Libraries
Institute Head of European Libraries Cooperation Unit
Kurt-Schumacher-Damm 12-16 13405 Berlin
Germany
Email: reinhardt@dbi-berlin.de
DBI URL: <http://www.dbi-berlin.de/bib_wes/dbi_euro/eurohome.htm>
EXPLOIT URL: <http://www.dbi-berlin.de/exploit.htm>
Klaus Reinhardt is the coordinator of the accompanying measures EXPLOIT and CULTIVATE-EU. He was the secretary of the National Focal Point Germany under the Telematics for Libraries Programme and member of the EU working party Education and Training, Libraries, Research in the Telematics Applications Program. He is now also the secretary of the German node in CULTIVATE and member of the new EU working party for key action III of the IST Programme (Interactive Publishing; Digital Content and Cultural Heritage; Education and Training; Human Language Technologies; Information Access, Filtering, Analysis and Handling).
Mary Rowlatt, Cathy Day, Jo Morris and Robert Davies describe SEAMLESS: An Organisational and Technical Model for Seamless Access to Distributed Public Information. The article outlines some of the lessons the research team have learned during the course of the project and also indicates how Essex Libraries are planning to continue to develop and maintain SEAMLESS once the LIC funded research project is completed.
The SEAMLESS project [1] aims to develop a new model for
citizens' information – one which is distributed, and
based on partnerships and common standards. The project, which is funded for
two years by the Library and Information Commission under the former BLRIC
Management and Co-operation Programme, started in February 1998. Currently the
team are working with 29 local organisations, covering a wide range of sectors,
to develop the necessary standards and set up a prototype system.
The objectives of the SEAMLESS project are to:
The team have developed a SEAMLESS interface to the diverse data resources provided by the participating organisations. Initial targets include information pooled locally on the SEAMLESS server using Z’mbol [2], a number of remote databases using Z39.50 [3] or Z’mbol, together with resources which exist as web pages (or as word-processed documents which have been converted to HTML format and have had the SEAMLESS web page metatags added) which are retrieved and indexed using HARVEST [4].
One of our concerns when we started the project was that other information providers may not be keen to work with us. In fact the opposite proved to be true. In many respects the SEAMLESS project has been an exercise in managing expectations and keeping participating organisations down to a manageable number. Our original proposal stated that we would work with 6 to 12 local organisations to develop a prototype distributed citizens' information system, however we are currently working with 29.
There are, we think, two reasons for this. Firstly SEAMLESS arrived on the scene when the time was "right". SEAMLESS chimed well with the emerging government agenda for the Information Age, and with many of their key initiatives - partnership working, modernising local government and empowering citizens. Also, we arrived at a time when organisations were becoming more aware of the potential of ICTs and the Internet and were looking for new and more effective ways of working. In this context SEAMLESS seemed to offer them some benefits.
Secondly we have been able to achieve good publicity and a high profile locally. This has been effective in creating momentum and kudos for the project. Instead of having to persuade organisations to join the project we found that we actually had to turn organisations away in order to keep the project manageable. The downside was SEAMLESS was sometimes seen, by quite influential people, as a magic solution that could solve any information problem and we sometimes had to work hard to bring their expectations down to a more realistic level.
When we wrote the proposal we assumed a certain level of sophistication in the information systems in use by local information providers. We anticipated that most information providers would be using databases, a significant number would have their own web sites, some would be running servers connected to the Internet, and maybe a few would be running Z39.50 compliant servers.
What we found was a much more complicated picture. Many of the smaller agencies and voluntary organisations had little more than word processors. The system therefore had to be designed to cope with word-processed documents as well as databases and web sites.
Quite a few organisations had websites, but in many cases they were contracted out to external bodies which not only managed and hosted the site for them, but also created the content. This added a further level of complexity to meetings and discussions. It also meant that the organisations themselves had to pay to get the work done. We found that this could sometimes be a disincentive – in general we found it easier to persuade organisations to commit staff time to the project rather than hard cash.
One area where anticipated problems did not materialise was with the data itself. We were aware of a number of research projects which had been funded under the JISC's eLib [5] and the Telematics for Libraries (EU) [6] programmes with the aim of searching collections of distributed resources. However, these had largely focused on bibliographic data – the catalogues of academic libraries, museums and archives. Catalogue data is by nature very structured and we were not sure that a similar approach could cope with the huge variety of unstructured data we expected to find in the domain of citizens' information. However, so far at least, the SEAMLESS profile has been able to accommodate everything we've wanted to add to the system.
When we started the project we were thinking of two models for citizens' information. The traditional library based, centralised database of community information and a new, library led, distributed citizens' information system. Citizens' information seemed to us to be a rather more powerful and active construct than community information in that it consists of the actual data itself, rather than signposts to the organisations providing it, and it encourages and facilitates direct interaction between the user and the provider through the provision of interactive services and communication facilities.
Now, however, the picture appears somewhat more complex and fragmented. Firstly, Essex, along with Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Southend, Thurrock and Peterborough, was recently awarded £500,000 by the DCMS/Wolfson Public Libraries Challenge Fund to develop connectivity and co-operation in the Eastern Region. One stream of the Co-East project [7] focuses on linking up community information databases in the region using the SEAMLESS standards. Given the short timescale of the project, which is to be completed by the end of March 2000, it is inevitable that the other authorities will have to use their existing library based, centralised community information databases, at least in the first instance. Immediately therefore we are faced with a ‘mixed economy’ of centralised and distributed information systems.
In addition we have become aware that a number of government initiatives, for example the University for Industry, the Early Years Development Scheme, and NHS Direct, are crucially dependent on the development of, what are in effect, new citizens' information systems, this time quite outside the library sphere. Some of these systems may well be distributed systems in their own right. SEAMLESS is currently working with all these organisations with a view to including their data in the SEAMLESS system which raises a further prospect – that of a grouping or hierarchy of distributed systems working together.
When we wrote the original proposal we had an idea that we might be able to identify the definitive citizens' information profile. However, it very quickly became apparent that although it might simplify things considerably if everyone adopted the same profile, this was unlikely to be achievable in a real world environment where a number of different profiles were already in use. This is especially true if you consider that many of the systems we would need to link with are developing quite outside the library sphere.
Rather than create a totally new profile for SEAMLESS, we based the SEAMLESS profile [8] on existing, and widely used profiles. The SEAMLESS Information Profile. is a set of 33 attributes, based on a subset of the GILS [9] (Government, or Global, Information Locator Service) Profile, with some additional attributes from the IMS [10] (Instructional Management Scheme) to cater for more detailed information about educational courses. Discussions with the participating information providers indicated a desire to incorporate the Alta Vista format for the keyword and description attributes. These therefore appear without the SEAMLESS se. prefix, with the intention that they can be recognised by the Alta Vista crawler as well as by SEAMLESS.
In order to achieve interoperability with other systems we have produced a draft mapping(11) between the SEAMLESS profile and the Dublin Core. We are also working on a mapping between Dublin Core, US Marc Community Information Format, GILS and the SEAMLESS profile and have had some discussions with the Library of Congress and other experts about this. We hope to be able to publish the results of this work in Spring 2000.
In our original proposal we recognised that many organisations currently expend considerable time and effort collecting data to supplement their own core data and that this results not only in duplication of data but represents an unnecessary workload. We stated that one of the potential benefits of SEAMLESS would be that this duplication of effort would be reduced because organisations would be able to concentrate on their core data and rely on the system to supply the other information they need.
Rationalisation of data in this way will take time and even with the limited amount of data currently in the Beta version we have found that duplication of data is likely to be problematic. We plan to tackle this in a number of ways. Firstly, we plan to be more proactive in managing the supply of content to the system by assisting participating organisations to assess what is their core data, and then concentrating on incorporating that into the system.
Secondly, we are beginning to think that perhaps we should focus, in the first instance, on the larger organisations which tend to provide the majority of the public services in the region, and therefore maintain as core data a great deal of potentially useful information for SEAMLESS.
Thirdly, we do not wish to disenfranchise or delay the smaller organisations but there is a clear management overhead in introducing each additional organisation to the system. We are already working with some of the large 'umbrella' or co-ordinating groups such as the Essex Community Foundation and the Essex Community Volunteer Service. By incorporating their databases into SEAMLESS we will be able to create an initial presence for the smaller organisations at very little overhead.
Lastly we plan to explore whether it might be possible to develop specific tools to cope with the problems caused by data duplication and also investigate whether changes to the system architecture might be beneficial.
The application of the metadata to web pages and Word documents, or 'tagging,' has caused some problems. During the course of the project most of the organisations have been in the position of applying metadata to pre-existing documents. Applying metadata in this way is time consuming and expensive. Clearly it would be much more efficient if we could move from retrospective tagging to tagging at source, i.e. at the time when the document is created, and we are working with the organisations to develop ways of doing this.
The accuracy and quality of tagging has been difficult to control and mistakes may result in poor information retrieval or documents being rejected by the system entirely. The tags, although not difficult to understand, have to conform exactly to the required syntax, which includes opening and closing brackets and quotation marks around attribute names and variables. It is very easy to make mistakes, and not very easy to spot them by eye.
There is also an issue about how many of the attributes organisations chose to apply. Only 6 of the attributes are mandatory and there is a danger that this minimum set becomes the norm, with a corresponding negative effect on the sophistication of both searching and display within the system. We also found that the production of database reports proved more difficult than we had expected, largely due to the lack of experience in report generation among the partners. Although time consuming we have been able to resolve these problems by providing individual support and guidance as required.
Some of the technically more advanced organisations, however, have managed not only to automate the process successfully, but to build it into their normal work practices such that it is not seen as a burden at all. A good example of this is Anglia Polytechnic University who have developed a system which produces a tagged version of their prospectus every time it is updated. We plan to work closely with organisations such as this with a view to sharing best practice and making the task easier for others.
There is a need to find ways to simplify the process for participating organisations, and to improve the accuracy and reduce the overheads of data preparation. We are planning to develop a number of tools which might assist in this process including tagging templates, syntax checkers and metadata generators.
The application of the SEAMLESS profile only achieves interoperability at the technical level. It ensures that the SEAMLESS system can 'read' the data from other data sources and that it 'looks' in the right fields for particular sorts of information. In order for the system to work effectively we have also had to achieve some level of semantic interoperability, to ensure that participating organisations are using a common vocabulary to index their data. This has been achieved through the development of the SEAMLESS thesaurus and place name authority list.
However, one of the problems that has become apparent in the Beta testing is that not all organisations are indexing to the same level of detail. This has an impact on retrieval from the system as more detailed indexing leads to improved recall and precision. However, in the real world there is a very real tension between exhaustive indexing and the workload involved. There is a similar problem with websites. Some organisations apply the SEAMLESS metatags to all of their pages, whilst others only apply them to the higher level pages. Again this affects information retrieval.
Now that we have a larger body of data in the Beta system it is easier for the organisations to assess the impact of their metadata and indexing practices, and we are hopeful that this will encourage them to apply both the metatags and the index terms more exhaustively. We are also working on improving and enlarging both the thesaurus and the place name authority list, and are investigating whether these can be automated to ease the burden on participating organisations.
All of this represented a fairly steep leaning curve for both the project team and the partners but it's encouraging to note that all of the organisations we started with are still working with us and many now feel that they have learned some useful new skills along the way.
We have found that building, supporting and maintaining the partnerships has been an ongoing, and time-consuming commitment and that, if the system is to grow and develop, dedicated staff will be required to manage both the technical side of the system and the partnerships.
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, on the technical side, there is a continuing task to be performed in administering the system and the server, and in developing and maintaining the necessary tools, the metadata tools, thesaurus etc, to support the process. This task will grow as the number of distributed resources making up the system increases. In addition, both the technology and available standards are developing and changing very rapidly in this area and there will be a continuous need to monitor this and adapt the system as necessary.
On the organisational side we have found a need to maintain continuous contact with our existing partners, to cope with changes in their staff, their information, and their systems. Even within the short timespan of the project so far, 5 of our partners have launched new websites, two organisations have merged, and in 6 organisations our main contact has changed. Staff changes can be positive and in most of these cases we have noticed increased involvement and activity on the project following the appointment of new staff. We were pleased to note that in all cases the ‘germ’ of the idea has survived within the organisation and the management were keen to maintain their participation in the project.
The introduction of new partners as we build and expand the system will require the input of considerable staff time. In addition there will also be a continuous need to ensure compliance with the standards adopted, to monitor quality and performance, to provide feedback and evaluation to partners and management, and to market, promote and develop the system. Within the research project this management role has been taken by Essex Libraries and participating organisations have recently expressed a desire that the Library continue to exercise this role as the project begins the transition from research project to live system.
The SEAMLESS project, a relatively small project, has had a big impact at local, national and regional levels and the team are working with significantly more organisations than we originally envisaged. In co-operation with our local information partners we have:
We have achieved a high profile and strong support from a wide range of local organisations in the County, and have a ‘waiting list’ of organisations wishing to join the project. The success of the project to date has also enabled us to influence the County Council agenda. We have been able to input to the Corporate Information Strategy and to ensure that the strategy reflects the importance of citizens' information. Most significantly we have secured long term funding from the County Council to enable us to build upon the SEAMLESS project with a view to developing a fully functioning Citizens' Information system in Essex. In the first instance this funding will enable us to appoint two permanent members of staff to work on SEAMLESS, to develop the metadata tools and improve and automate the thesaurus. We plan to launch the system to the public during Spring 2000.
Mary Rowlatt
Information Services Manager
Essex Libraries
Chelmsford Library
PO Box 882
Chelmsford
Essex CM0 8PN
Tel:+44 1245 436524
Fax: +44 1245 436769
Email: maryr@essexcc.gov.uk
Cathy Day and Jo Morris
Research Assistants
SEAMLESS Project
Essex Libraries
Chelmsford Library
PO Box 882
Chelmsford
Essex CM0 8PN
Tel:+44 1245 436560 Fax: +44 1245 436769 Email: seamless@essexcc.gov.uk
Robert Davies, Director
Education for Change Ltd.
United House
North Road
London N79 DP
Tel: + 44 171 697 8881
Fax: + 44 171 697 8883
Email: rob.davies@efc.co.uk
URL: http://www.efc.co.uk/
Hanne Marie Kvaerndrup gives a brief introduction to Denmark's Electronic Research Library. The article describes the vision, concept and main components, the organisation, plans and future challenges.
The Danish national project DEF (which in Danish is the acronym for Denmark's Electronic Research Library) aims to move our libraries from the state of automated, conventional, cooperating individual libraries to the state of one large, coherent, electronic library structure providing integrated information services.
The DEF vision is to offer the end-user:
To turn this vision into reality we have to deal with technical issues such as:
Furthermore we have to deal with management issues such as:
Danish research libraries will be developed during a five year period (1998-2002) to function as one integrated research library: Denmark's Electronic Research Library. In cooperation with the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture has decided to invest 200 million DKK in the project which aims to provide researchers, students, business, and other professionals with easier, faster, and more effective access to the latest research information. The project is part of the government’s current initiative for research and IT.
The system of research libraries will form a virtual system, which will transcend the borders of regional and local libraries in a simple, transparent way, and within the given legal and economic framework. It will make the libraries' collective information resources of digital and traditional materials available to users all over the country.
The establishment of Denmark’s Electronic Research Library is based on existing technology. The aim is to provide an efficient national information supply which provides those resources already developed in the research libraries of the country and which makes it possible to incorporate other information centres as a natural part of the virtual information system. The overall effect is achieved by linking the networks of the research libraries and by complying with international standards: for communication, for search support, for registration and indexing, for document description and representation, etc.
Everybody will have access: from home, from the office or from the library. This means the possibility of swift and coordinated searching across several databases based on a combination of many search profiles independent of the physical position of the databases, nationally as well as internationally. It also means a uniform, user-friendly retrieval system with the same user interface, whichever database one is using. And finally it will provide the end-user with an automatically updated list of literature and periodicals chosen according to individual search profiles and criteria, using search robots.
The idea of a 'critical mass' is related to making a great number of resources easily accessible – and therefore attractive for the user. There are three types of materials relevant in establishing DEF to which a high priority is given in the project phase. They are:
High priority is also given to tools that link the virtual library to the physical collection, i.e. retro-conversion of catalogues.
The overall objective is that Denmark should achieve the qualitative and economic advantages of digital and network-based research libraries offering users the ability to acquire the relevant research information directly, regardless of where the information is located.
The vision of DEF includes a platform, where not only the users of the twelve largest research libraries will get access to an extended mass of electronic journals, but maximum benefit from national licenses will be offered to smaller research libraries and libraries at smaller research and educational institutions. In the future development, county libraries should have access via a 'pay per view' model - and in due course any library in Denmark should be connected to DEF.
The vision also includes new services based on individual service profiles of users and the development of intelligent agents.
A special benefit might be that DEF would evolve into making available not only a complete registration of Danish research, but also a full text representation of all Danish research. This idea is closely linked to the publishing policy of universities and researchers in relation to an electronic and institutional publishing codex. A construction like DEF offers the potential for establishing an alternative publishing structure, but this is no doubt a long-term perspective.
In order to turn this concept into reality the Danish project has identified four main components - each of them necessary to achieve the objective.
The four main components of the project are:
The national infrastructure is the IT network and facilities enabling the libraries and the users to communicate efficiently.
The Danish Research Net has been chosen as the IT-network. This IT network has the advantage that a substantial part of the users are already attached to it.
This national infrastructure is, however, more than technology. The overall infrastructure includes creating common guidelines for, in particular, national license agreements, exchange of information, use of international standards, unified user access etc. The regulations for user administration must also be uniform and according to consensus among all the libraries.
To enable each library to become a component in this, virtual library, it should be modernised in a number of ways. Until now it has been acceptable for each library to use its own individual IT systems and organisational procedures. In the virtual research library the technology and a number of organisational issues must be standardised.
Increased cooperation between the research libraries will require overall common management and coordination. Cooperation across ministerial borders should be established, but the local participants must retain their independence in order to preserve the dynamics of the system.
For traditional 'non-digital' materials the most important issue is the catalogue, but also digitisation of some parts of various collections is under consideration. For the 'new' materials - originally delivered in digital form - the challenges are:
National principles and a strategy for digitisation have just been worked out by the DEF's Steering Committee. It concerns standards, methods, and competence centres - and a plan for selection of collections to be digitised.
National License agreements are negotiated and signed by The National Library Authority on behalf of DEF. A national license is defined not in respect of number of users, but in relation to governmental financial support. Any library can cooperate with another library or institution, form a consortium and negotiate licenses. The consortium can apply for financial backing from DEF thereby making sure that all relevant institutions are invited to share the license.
For the digital library user facilities will be a major issue, especially an economic issue. It will be crucial to provide the user with sufficient facilities and electronic services.
The project was defined in September 1996 by a project description by the three ministries involved.
A governmental agency, UNI-C, and the management consulting firm Ernst and Young then conducted a study, which resulted in the publishing of a report in early Spring 1997.
The following project organisation was devised for the implementation of Denmark's Electronic Research Library:
The Steering Committee represents various competencies: library management, research and IT.
The role of The Danish National Library Authority will be to execute the decisions of the Steering Committee in general. The Authority will be the formal holder of national licenses.
Right now the Steering Committee is discussing the future organisation of the research libraries. The strategy behind the five year project is to accelerate the inevitable change of paradigm. The extra money obviously helps to upgrade systems and give access to electronic journals. If that is all, what will happen after the five years is a demand for a new project to support a never-ending need for upgrading. A change that can cope with other priorities than today’s will be necessary.
We see an organisational parallel in the credit card business. In the first place each bank had its own card with a low number of transactions and a high level of operating expenses. The perspective in the credit card technology was - as we now know - a global card that might be used by all banks. The conditions for such a card had to be technical standards and standards for use and an ethical code. From this platform the Visa Card quickly became global, the speed of increase and development escalated even if the card was and is administered by a very small organisation.
A national digital library can be organised along very simple rules:
Cornerstones in the model are global IT, networking models of the kind you find in Silicon Valley and the Danish tradition for cooperative organisations.
The crucial point for the project Denmark’s Electronic Research Library is within the project period to obtain a markedly improved service for the users, which will in turn entice the libraries to continue the service and the cooperation.
The status of DEF at December 1999 is given below:
Denmark's Electronic Research Library is a project running for five years (1998-2002) and funded by the three Danish Ministries of Culture, Research and Education respectively with a total budget of 200 million DKK. The aim of the project is like that of other electronic library projects, namely primarily to offer users the chance to obtain relevant research information directly, regardless of where the information is located. The electronic research library will consist of data from many different sources. It will provide the user with access to a huge number of international on-line articles as well as data on the existing collections in the country's research libraries - all linked together in one system. Three different kinds of access will probably be available at the end of the project period: free access for everybody to catalogue facilities, metadata etc. Free access for researchers and students to licensed information and a pay per view or similar access to non-institutional users. There are two remarkable aspects of this project. The first is that it is defined as a national project which aims to establish a national virtual library service involving national policies for infrastructure, national licenses to full text databases, digitising of printed material and retro-conversion of catalogues etc. The second point is that the project has some service goals certainly, but has as yet not clearly defined the desired organisational end result. It is an open project of the kind that has never before been carried out in the Danish library world. It will affect the priorities of every single participating library, it will change the service profile, it will create a new cooperation between the institutions, it may affect the publishing structure as well as the registration and marketing of research results. But first and foremost, of course, it will mean round-the-clock access to important research information from any connected computer.
Hanne Marie Kvaerndrup
Library Advisory Officer
The Danish National Library Authority
Tel: +45 33 73 33 73
Email: hmk@bs.dk
URL: <http://www.deff.dk/>
or <http://www.deflink.dk/>
Lorenzo Cantoni reports on the experiences of the SwissCast project. SwissCast is a project run by the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the University of the Italian Switzerland (Lugano) and the Department of Applied Arts of the Tessin High School for Applied Sciences, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Its purpose is to study push technologies and to develop a prototype service in different content areas in order to better understand the communicational dynamics. The project, which will finish at the end of March 2000, has built a fully-functioning service in the area of information support for University Research and Development and a prototype in the area of medical-pharmaceutical information. The project has already shown many interesting features which a "push" service can provide and emphasises the developmental role which communications issues can provide for technology.
This articles has three different purposes:
A popular communications metaphor for information access on the Internet is that of browsing information from the World Wide Web. Here users actively search for information they need by browsing web sites. To do so they often make use of search engines (e.g. AltaVista) or directory services (e.g. Yahoo!). In the last few years, due to the growth of the Internet community and of information resources available on the web, this first paradigm has shown some major shortcomings, which can be summarised under three main headlines: quantity & relevance, quality, updating.
Quantity & Relevance: Due to information overload, it is quite difficult to find out what one is looking for, both in general (having a question and finding relevant material over the Internet), and at a specific web site answering the question: is there anything relevant for me in this web site? (or: is there something more on the subject here? and how much?). This means that every search over the Internet is becoming more and more time demanding (efficiency issue), and needs special ad hoc skills in order to be really useful (effectiveness issue).
Quality: Once relevant items are found quality issues arise: are the resources of good quality or not? Now just about everybody can publish everything and many new actors are struggling to gain an audience and receive credit. Professionals, who are normally well equipped when judging other media, are not always able to assess with the same certainty information providers' quality on the Internet. Additional expertise is needed in order to monitor and assess new information resources in specific content areas.
Updating: Information on the Internet changes continuously. Users cannot know if they accessed the newest version or not. In general, they find it too time-consuming to return to a web site again and again to check if there is something new on the web site. Automatic checking activities are needed to provide information on the most recently updated resources.
The paradigm of information casting or "push" (also known as WebCasting, PushCasting, Channel Broadcasting, etc.) could offer relevant answers to these issues - see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] and [8].
Information casting is the term used for the automatic delivery of content to a computer desktop over the Internet. Although a definition of 'push' may be difficulkt toi achieve, a good one seems to be the following:
Push is the automatic delivery of content to users' computer desktop; content is organised by topic defined by a publisher and users receive information according to their own pre-defined profiles.
Three elements thus integrate a would-be complete definition: automatic delivery, content organisation, user profile.
Automatic Delivery: In order to provide a push service you need some sort of automatic delivery of information items to end users. This is similar to radio and TV broadcasting, where end users simply receive what is sent. Automatic delivery is carried out using special technologies, ranging from point to point casting to multicasting.
The emphasis on the technological aspect has stressed the need for increased bandwidth equirements and supported technologies (e.g. live audio/video) rather than the communicational issues themsevesf. The definition suggested above requires, however, opens up many possibilities, from plain text e-mail messages to audio/video clip delivery. In our opinion, what is most important are neither bandwidth nor technologies (which all are communicational tools) but the fact that each single message has not to be solicited, but is automatically delivered to its receivers in a given, suitable way.
This last observation helps to better outline the general SwissCast philosophy: trying to follow the natural communication hierarchy: moving from meanings and human communication needs towards suitable communication tools and not vice versa. In other words the question which drives the research programme is: Which technologies are useful for which communication flows?
This point of view explains also the project choice of using many different communication tools to build up the push service prototype, including e-mail messages and web browsing (personal page approach).
Content Organisation: A main added value an information service has to offer is that of selecting, organising and editing, according to its clients' interests, information items coming from different sources. Another relevant advantage will be that of presenting selected items formatted following a given, homogeneous format, helping end users to process more items in less time.
User Profile: Push technologies and services are quite similar to the traditional TV broadcasting: an information provider delivers news on given subjects. The inner nature of the electronic medium offers much more customisation possibilities, both offering pre-defined thematic channels to which end users can subscribe, or allowing end users themselves to define their own channel/s (user profile), this last one is the choice made by the SwissCast project.
After a first enthusiastic welcome, push technologies do not appear to have revolutionised the web. Neither Netscape nor Microsoft are developing or upgrading their proprietary channel technology (nor do they make an extensive use of it) and many push technology providers appear to have changed their area of interest.
In our opinion this situation can be explained by a rather one-sided vision of push services, which emphasises almost only the technological side of the overall "push story".
We believe that push services are neither only, nor mainly, technological tools that help finding information in Internet, but are true information brokerage services, which try to bridge the gap between the information content available on Internet and the users' needs. To do so, they perform a series of actions, which include [9]:
In this process technology can be very helpful, mainly in order (1) to access information through the Internet, (2) to perform very repetitive tasks as regularly searching web sites or matching new information items against users' profiles and (3) to regularly monitor information flows and users' behaviours.
If we consider the activity of a push service as being that of an information broker, we have to take into account three main elements the broker has to manage.
Let us consider the brokerage function in more detail:
The purpose of the SwissCast project [10] is that of studying and working out a prototype Internet-based communication service which can select and broadcast information organised to meet different user-profiles in well-defined professional/interest groups: a "push service".
The project also tries to examine a number of relevant issues, including: classification and choice of the most suitable hardware/software tools, analysis of information providers' and information users' communication needs, design of user-oriented graphical interfaces and the realisation of suitable validation procedures.
In order to implement and validate the service two different areas were chosen: Research & Development in a University setting and medical/pharmaceutical information. In the SwissCast project activities both information providers and end-users actively co-operate with the researchers who work at the building and validation of the service.
The SwissCast project was approved and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). It started in autumn 1997 and is currently run by the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the University of the Italian Switzerland, and the Department of Applied Arts of the Tessin High School for Applied Sciences. The project leaders, managers, researchers and consultants come from very different scientific areas, bit all are involved with communications issues [11].
In addition a number of pharmaceutical companies are involved in the SwissCast project as project partners, namely: Pfizer AG, IBSA, Institut Biochimique; Künzle, and ActaMed Services: an agency specialised in information brokering in the health area, with a deep insight and a long experience in the concerned information market.
Project activities at first were those of analysing the two research areas and the involved information market. Bibliographic research as well as interviews with professionals helped in getting the needed knowledge. In parallel, a deep analysis of information push available research, technologies and services was undergone. Collaboration with Eurospider - a spin-off company of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Switzerland) - helped the SwissCast team to focus its research object and gain an understanding of the main differences between information retrieval services and push services.
In spring 1999 a full-functioning version of the SwissCast push service was made available online. It is being tested and assessed. This will last until the end of the project in March 2000.
In this section, we will present the architecture and the functionalities of the push service built in the framework of the SwissCast project.
From the point of view of information flow, the system contains the elements displayed in Figure 1.
 Figure 1: The Swisscast Architecture |
Information retrieval & information classification Information is in part directly inserted into the push service by the active information providers (those who have signed a special agreement with the SwissCast service) or it is retrieved by the information editor (namely, but not exclusively, from the web) and inserted by the information editor in the information storage. All insertion activities are carried out using web forms.
Ad hoc software modules were implemented to interface external databases with the SwissCast document database; this is the case of active information providers whose data are stored in corporate databases.
All items of information must be classified according to a standard keyword scheme and formatted along a pre-defined structure. For the University Research area the Subject Classification Codes by CORDIS has been adopted [12]. After the first test phase, a need to reorganize the keyword list has been shown, in order to better suit the actual interest profiles of the SwissCast end users.
For the pharmaceutical area the Medical Subject Headings used by the US National Library of Medicine were chosen; for this area other keywords were added, to map various information types. Those ones were elaborated through focus groups and interviews held with health care professionals.
Information storage (document database) The document database is a key element in the system, because it contains what will be pushed to end users in a standard format. Many items in the document database will also contain a reference to a web page that gives more information on the subject.
Push module This module periodically matches new information items inserted in the document database against users' profiles and attributes new relevant documents to the corresponding profiles; users can read relevant documents through a common web browser (personal web page approach). Moreover, this module contains an agent that regularly checks for new documents and sends notification to each user via e-mail. E-mail messages contain the titles of new information pieces assigned to a given user profile, as well as a direct link to the user profile page.
After four weeks of being displayed every document is removed, unless end users checked it to maintain it. This activity is performed due to the "push" nature of the service, and in order not to have too big - and thus useless - document lists.
The complete management tool set is accessible to the information editor through the web. It provides utilities to monitor the system settings and running, as well as many statistical utilities.
Since the goal of the project is to study the communicational flows in push services, rather than to develop new technologies, most of the SwissCast system has been developed using freeware software tools adapted to the Project needs and interfaced with the web using CGI programming. In more detail, the following tools were used:
Moreover, the interface of the service with the information editor, the information providers and the end-user is completely web-based and thus all the necessary tasks – including the management of the service and the input of documents – can be done via a web browser.
The SwissCast system is thus based on a database, which acts as a container both for information and user's profiles data. Information are classified and inserted within the database manually from active providers (filling information via web forms) or automatically through dedicated gateways from other databases accessed via Internet. An account (username and password) is assigned by the information editor of the service to each active provider, in order to guarantee their identification.
A gatherer unit was implemented in order to help the information editor to perform repetitive tasks. In detail, it constantly checks a list of web pages and automatically displays last updates; through a filter unit the information editor can discard all useless information and insert into the SwissCast documents' database only relevant information items, mapping them according to the standards.
Once a new document is inserted into the SwissCast documents’ database, a match against all existing profiles is performed, and the document will be automatically and instantly assigned to the corresponding profiles. The match criteria is based on Boolean operators, working on the keywords schema through which every document is classified and every profile is created.
Moreover, an agent periodically checks each profile for new documents, and sends notification to the corresponding user via e-mail if new documents were found. Other pieces of software were developed in order to monitor and assess the service (usage statistics, keywords schema efficiency, etc.) as well as to do the system administration.
A running prototype has been working for the area of University R&D information since May 1999.
The R&D area has been chosen as the first area of application due to the possibility of a close co-operation with the Research Office of the University of Italian Switzerland, thus having from the very beginning of the Project an interested partner that knows very well the specific application field. At the same time, R&D information is a domain well suited for the development of push services because most of the internal communication and of the information exchange in the scientific community already develops via Internet, researchers are thus used to this medium. A very important push service in the research area is already run by the European Community.
The SwissCast service for R&D has been specifically targeted to the information needs of researchers in Ticino and, in general, of Italian-speaking scientists in Switzerland; it is now fully operational and can be freely accessed [13].
The test phase has started in July 1999, it involves about 150 University professors, researchers and students, and assesses the service professional relevance, as well as its functionalities and graphical user interface.
Service assessment takes into account what can be automatically recorded (service usage, number of user profiles, and so on) as well as what the users say and perceive about the service, a first questionnaire was filled in by 20 SwissCast end-users, whose results guided the first service improvements. In the first months of 2000 at about 20 semi-structured interviews are planned with end-users and active providers, in order to get a deeper understanding of their perceptions and needs. The analysis of users' profiles has shown the need of modifying the keywords' list, to better semantically capture the actual information pieces SwissCast delivers to its clients.
The prototype for the medical-pharmaceutical information service is currently under in-house testing, and will be operational in December 1999; it will be run by ActaMed, and monitored and assessed by the SwissCast team. In parallel a national survey on the usage of Internet by Swiss health care professionals started in November 1999.
One of the results of the SwissCast project has been the identification of a number of key factors which must be fulfilled in order to build a effective push service.
Technology matters At the beginning of the push history there was a tendency to develop new applications, using very specific interfaces to the user-side; many tools, like PointCast, are quite intrusive, and demanding at the hardware and connection level, in order to achieve real-time updating. But not every push service has to be so demanding at the level of technology: quite often it can use the oldest and simplest push technology — e-mail — to deliver (or, at least, to notify) news, and a common web-browser to view relevant documents.
Information relevance matters Push technology has to meet well defined information needs, specific professional interests. In other words, as long as information got through the Internet is perceived and remains a second-choice information, only for laymen, not so many people will be interested in defining user profiles, for the simple reason that they can't and don't want to. Browsing without an end will remain more appealing than just getting specific, narrow-scope information. This explain why the push over intranets, where professional information needs are better defined, seems to grow more than the push over the Internet.
Information classification matters The relevance issue concerns also the issue of how to define user-profiles and — at the same time — how to semantically map the content. After many experiences and experiments, one must agree with the necessity of a human intervention, although assisted by suitable automatic tools, in order to establish how to define a user profile, and to map each information item. Here the difference between search and push services becomes most clear: the first ones have to provide useful stuff, to be further analysed, the last ones must offer only relevant items.
Information quality matters Closely connected with the previous areas, is that of information quality: professionals need to know that information they get is certified. Otherwise they will need nonetheless to go other ways — more traditional, better known by them and thus more secure.
Information layout matters Getting relevant good quality information is the strength of push services, but one more element has to be added. It consists in the way new items are presented, a way which must be easy, clear and not time demanding to be accessed. Otherwise paper technology will win the competition.
Graphical User Interface matters The proper public for push services being mainly professionals (not necessarily IT professionals), and their reason to use these services being to access updated, good quality, added value, relevant information items, the access must be as easy as possible. Non computer experts (or addicted) professionals don't want to become IT professionals, they just want to use the computer as a tool, and could be refrained from use it if they perceive the instrument as an obstacle.
SwissCast research activities have shown how necessary it is to pull together different competencies and skills to effectively meet communicational needs: technological tools are fundamental, but can't work without a continuous collaboration with communicational and visual graphics competencies.
The outcomes of the SwissCast project open a series of very interesting developments in research; in fact, SwissCast, being a functioning prototype with real users, offers an ideal platform to test more advanced methods and tools.
In the online version of the service, technical tools are used only to manage documents and profiles, to deliver information, and to execute repetitive tasks. This approach is very robust, because all complex tasks – e.g., information classifying – are left to human competence; on the other side, it can be, if the service becomes large, very time and resources consuming.
The first research line we wish to develop is thus the use of artificial intelligence methods to implement smarter functions, either to help the service manager (e.g. tools which pre-sort the information), or to interact with the users (e.g. to develop 'dynamic' user profiles, in order to obtain an improved information casting which could be automatically customised according to users' behaviour).
A second research line is that of the semantic mapping of information and of complex systems of keywords; while the actual system is based on a very simple (one-dimensional) scheme, which is the same for the information classification and for the definition of user's profiles, more complex structures, possibly integrating user's behaviour, could give more flexibility and could be very helpful to cope with increasing information volumes.
Finally, we wish to stress the issue of customisation of the service: tools and procedures which allow to adapt the system to the structure of each information market and to changing user needs would greatly add to the practical interest of such a service and thus open to new application fields.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Cf. as well: Maurizio Decina,
Lorenzo Cantoni, Benedetto Lepori, Riccardo Mazza, Paolo Jannuzzi,
The SwissCast information push service: A multidisciplinary research,
a multifaceted experience, ACM SIGIR'99 Workshop on Customised Information
Delivery, (August 19, 1999 - Berkeley, California),
Lorenzo Cantoni
Università della Svizzera Italiana
SwissCast Project
via Ospedale 13
CH-6900 Lugano
Switzerland
URL: <http://www.lu.unisi.ch/>
Tel: +41 91 9124720
Email: lorenzo.cantoni@lu.unisi.ch
Lorenzo Cantoni works as a part-time researcher in the SwissCast Project, at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Università della Svizzera Italiana, where he coordinates the Atelier "Web Promotion & Production". He also teaches Communication Theory at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy).
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