Núria Gallart presents the achievements of four academic libraries in the implementation of a distributed digital library working for the service of their users.
Libraries are confronted with the explosion of information in both printed and electronic formats and the complexity of newly arising publishers and aggregators digital services. Libraries are in a position which allows for integration of multiple and heterogeneous resources with the only goal to serve a defined community of users. But models and means for these new services to be offered are slowly developing which could erode the potential for libraries to enter the digital arena and let them depend in the future from external service providers. DECOMATE II project [1] has explored one of these models in its global dimension of users requirements analysis, software development, content seeking and distinct costs identification.
From February 1998 to July 2000, Tilburg University (TU) Library in partnership with The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the European University Institute (EUI) libraries have been developing the prototype of what has the potential to become the European Digital Library for Economics.
Funding has been provided by the EC Telematics for Libraries programme (Project code LB-5672/B DECOMATE II) and important cooperation has been encountered in providers such as SilverPlatter Information (SP), a partner in the project too. Elsevier Science (ES) and Kluwer Academic Publishers (KAP) have been early sponsors by their willingness to make content available under reasonable conditions to the partners and Swets & Zeitlinger agreed to do contacts in order to engage further publishers. Last but not least, a group of libraries, those of Maastricht University, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Université Libre de Bruxelles, volonteered to act as test sites for the implementation and/or the use of the prototype thus allowing for evaluation of the requirements to be taken into account in the future exploitation plan.
The goal of the Decomate model [2] is to bring together all resources available to a defined community through a uniform interface. By using his/her personal identification, the user at one of the participating libraries should be able to access a number of heterogeneous resources for which his/her institution has obtained access rights as a collectivity. These resources, be full text or only bibliographic, locally held or remotely, should be available for simultaneous searching and downloading as appropriate. Added values as de-duplication, results optimization and a current awareness service are also included.
The provision of a uniform web-based interface to the resources offered by the academic library does match the long tradition of libraries catalogues as the key to locate any item in their collections. It extends the concept to the new digital environment. Whereas the integration of an authentication/authorization facility provides the means to deliver licensed full text content as well as commercial databases for retrieval and use from users desktops.
Relevant content for any knowledge area is becoming more and more spread into a significant number of databases, some of them locally held at the own library, some of them available on databases managed by other libraries or even by publishers or commercial aggregators. The Decomate model provides for simultaneous searching of any integrated database, be it locally held or remotely available, by intensive use of Z39.50 standard. It is the user who decides where to search according to his/her singular and current need, and the query will be performed in a transparent way in any of the desired databases, indifferent which search engine it is built on or at which place it is located.
Achieving a critical mass of information in a given area is the main challenge. The Decomate model allows for integration of a variety of resources, which, by the time of writing, are as many as the following:
Other databases are being implemented as ABI/Inform from ProQuest and JSTOR.
Any partner provides access to the content it has authorization for. All working together have the power to manage many different resources, sharing know-how about bibliographical data loading among other items, thus allowing for a reduction in service implementation costs.
How to keep track of relevant information when such an amount of documents are published every day? Although there are variations among disciplines, it seems that a number between 5-10 journals are regularly "read" by researchers [3], [4]. Citations, subject searches and references picked up from various sources are also means to achieve the needed update. One of the important features of the Decomate model is the addition of a current awareness service, able to regularly perform recorded searches and to deliver the results to the individual e-mail or on the Decomate site.
Two extra modules are optionally available for users to improve the results of their searches [5]:
Results Optimizer: its task is to convert multiple result sets from multiple databases into one large result set, grouping duplicate records together in the process.
Concept Browser: a two-dimensional browsing interface that visualises the existing library thesauri that have been used for (manually) indexing the databases.
There remain some challenges which will be of paramount importance for the future survival and expansion of the Decomate model:
Access complexity: a distributed model encompasses no control over the structure, management and performance of external databases. Therefore the quality of service becomes a shared task with high coordination challenges.
Content availability: the Decomate model asks providers for delivery of bibliographical data in order to have it locally installed or, at least, consortially managed. Currently, there are not many content providers able or willing to deliver these data.
DECOMATE II project has been able to develop and to implement an operative prototype of a European Digital Library for Economics, which can evolve to become an important transnational consortium.
The Decomate model for a digital library, by its use of standards and its modularity, is scalable and flexible enough to cope with new developments in the next future. It allows for the integration of more and more content, distributed and heterogeneous. It adds features for the optimization of results and services for current awareness.
The Decomate model brings to libraries a system for the global management of their digital collections, which is perfectly compatible and comparable to the recent developments of commercial services providers and which has the premium to allow for integration and management at the library level.
Núria Gallart
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Servei de Biblioteques
Edifici A - Rectorat
08193 Bellaterra
Spain
Tel: +34-93-5812746
Email: Nuria.Gallart@uab.es
URL:
http://www.bib.uab.es/
 Núria Gallart is employed as project manager at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Library Service
.
Her responsibilities include the management of innovative projects and the implementation of
new library services. |
For citation purposes:
Núria Gallart,
"DECOMATE II Project", Exploit Interactive, issue 6, 26th June 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issu>
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