Enriching the local catalog with bibliographic data exposed online: interaction with the national catalog via web services

Statut

“Interoperability efforts represent a significant part within the fieldwork of documentary engineering. The enhancement of its catalog is one of its primary objectives. From that preoccupation came the idea of using a web service of the ABES in order to offer a functionality such as “Get more information about this author” accessible from a view on the authority record, usable during the consultation of the OPAC. This web service brings back directly pieces of information coming from IdRef, the authority database reference of the SUDOC and displays the abbreviated forms of the different records linked to a given authority, classified by relator code. The response in XML or in JSON is elaborated in order to be in compliance with the graphic charter of the ILS and to not create any disruption through the chain of information. A general problematic assumption shows the high stakes and the context in which this web service was imagined and designed. A global expertise of the general outline of the ABES network is useful when trying to understand this functionality; the collaborative structure is briefly described. The articulation between the local and the national bases is made possible with the mediation of a PHP script whose major steps are detailed. Finally, as this project is aimed at being an experiment to reach further and operate other interactions of this kind, it is also important to apprehend the perspectives for the future that such new methods of accessing information can open. The implementation of this functionality has contributed to explore and stabilize new methods of project developments, but also to question the opening of the catalog on the universe of knowledge and to its potential use as a discovery tool. It questions again the interdependence between the local catalog and the SUDOC and has the virtue to set the issues according to a user-centered design.”

URL : Enriching the local catalog with bibliographic data exposed online: interaction with the national catalog via web services

Alternative URL : http://library.ifla.org/815/

 

Curation Micro Services A Pipeline Metaphor for Repositories…

Curation Micro-Services: A Pipeline Metaphor for Repositories :

“The effective long-term curation of digital content requires expert analysis, policy setting, and decision making, and a robust technical infrastructure that can effect and enforce curation policies and implement appropriate curation activities. Since the number, size, and diversity of content under curation management will undoubtedly continue to grow over time, and the state of curation understanding and best practices relative to that content will undergo a similar constant evolution, one of the overarching design goals of a sustainable curation infrastructure is flexibility. In order to provide the necessary flexibility of deployment and configuration in the face of potentially disruptive changes in technology, institutional mission, and user expectation, a useful design metaphor is provided by the Unix pipeline, in which complex behavior is an emergent property of the coordinated action of a number of simple independent components. The decomposition of repository function into a highly granular and orthogonal set of independent but interoperable micro-services is consistent with the principles of prudent engineering practice. Since each micro-service is small and self-contained, they are individually more robust and collectively easier to implement and maintain. By being freely interoperable in various strategic combinations, any number of micro-services-based repositories can be easily constructed to meet specific administrative or technical needs. Importantly, since these repositories are purposefully built from policy neutral and protocol and platform independent components to provide the function minimally necessary for a specific context, they are not constrained to conform to an infrastructural monoculture of prepackaged repository solutions. The University of California Curation Center has developed an open source micro-services infrastructure that is being used to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University system and a number of non-university content partners. This paper provides a review of the conceptual design and technical implementation of this micro-services environment, a case study of initial deployment, and a look at ongoing micro-services developments.”

URL : http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/1605

Web Services for Bibliometrics

Institutional repositories have spread in universities where they provide services for recording, distributing, and preserving the institution’s intellectual output. When the Lausanne “academic server”, named SERVAL, was launched at the end of 2008, the Faculty of Biology and Medicine addressed from the outset the issue of quality of metadata. Accuracy is fundamental since research funds are allocated on the basis of the statistics and indicators provided by the repository. The Head of faculty also charged the medical library to explore different ways to measure and assess the research output. The first step for the Lausanne university medical library was to implement the PubMed and the Web of Science web services to easily extract clean bibliographic information from the databases directly into the repository.

Now the medical library is testing other web services (from CrossRef, Web of Science, etc.) to generate quantitative data on research impact mainly. The approach is essentially based on citation linking. Although the utility of citation and bibliometric evaluation is still debated, the most prevalent output measures used for research evaluation are still those based on citation analysis. Even when a new scientific evaluation indicator is proposed, such as h-index, we can always see its link with citation. Additionally, the results of a new indicator are often compared with citation analysis. The presentation will review the web services which might be used in institutional repositories to collect and aggregate citation information for the researchers’ publications.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00540289/fr/