Sharing and re-use of catalogue records: what are the legal implications?
As part of making library resources as visible as possible in the Web environment, libraries are increasingly interested in making their catalogue records available for use in Web applications and indexing by Web search engines.
The records in a university library catalogue typically have many different origins: created by the library, obtained from a national library or a book supplier etc. So, who ‘owns’ them? And what are the legal implications of making them available to others when this involves copying, transferring them into different formats, etc.?
The JISC has just commissioned a study to explore some of these issues as they apply to UK university libraries and to provide practical guidance to library managers who may be interested in making their catalogue records available in new ways. Outcomes are expected by the end of 2009.
The specific objectives of the study are to:
• Establish the provenance of records in the catalogues of a small but representative sample of UK university libraries and in the national Copac and SUNCAT catalogues;
• Identify any rights or licences applying to the records and assess how these apply to re-use in the Web environment. This work should include clarifying the legal status of MARC records and copies of MARC records, and the legal implications of translating records between different formats such as MARC and MODS XML;
• Provide practical guidance to UK university libraries about the legal issues to be considered in making catalogue records available for re-use in Web applications such as social networking sites - drawing on the findings from the sample;
• Make recommendations to the JISC and the UK higher education community about any initiatives which could usefully be undertaken to facilitate the re-use of catalogue records in Web applications in a way which respects legal rights and business interests.
Modelling the library domain: outcomes of a workshop on 19th June 2009
Earlier this year, the JISC TILE (Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework) project proposed a draft high level ‘library domain model’ which could be used to further thinking about the functions and processes that library systems need to support in future.
A workshop to discuss the Model took place on 19th June 2009.
A draft report from the workshop is now available for comment.
Most of the presentations from the day are also available.
At the top level, the Model consists of three ‘realms’:
Corporation: organisations managing ‘assets’ and making them available
Channel: means of accessing the ‘assets’
Clients: those who want to use the ‘assets’
Participants discussed the relevance and applicability of these concepts and also how they might be applied in practice using a number of different scenarios.
A developer competition focused on library data
A JISC project called MOSAIC has set a competition for developers to develop a web app using library activity data. Full details are below:
The JISC MOSAIC project has gathered together data covering user activity in UK Higher Education libraries. The data, which is freely available for you to reuse, represents circulation records linked to the course affiliations of the borrowers.
The project is holding an open competition to discover what you can do with that data. This is your chance to impress the world with your ideas as well as your coding and to win one of three prizes of £1000, £250 and £100 …
- If you have a yearning to see library information put to best use and displayed to best effect
- If you like developing compelling applications and interfaces regardless of the domain
- If you’re into mash ups – but note that this competition is about any application, not restricted to mash ups
To enter, simply produce a browser based application that makes use of some or all of the MOSAIC library activity data by the closing date - Monday 31 August 2009.
Full details, open access to the data and competition rules
More about the JISC MOSAIC (Making Our Shared Activity Information Count) project
Do library catalogues and repositories talk to each other?
The Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde is currently investigating the links between university library catalogues and digital repositories as part of a JISC funded study.
Can library users find resources in their university’s digital repository through the library catalogue? Do library catalogues and repositories share records for the same items?
If catalogues and repositories generally aren’t linked in these sorts of ways at the moment, could they be?
These are some of the issues being explored by the study. The team are surveying repository managers and others about now - so, if you receive a request to respond to their online survey, your response would be much appreciated.
For further information about the study, please visit the project’s Web site and the project’s Web page on the JISC site.
How do people use electronic information resources?
Research funded by the JISC, RIN and others over recent years has helped to increase understanding of how students and researchers use electronic information resources. Analysis of Web logs - such as the work done for the e-Books Observatory Study by CIBER at UCL - has proved a fruitful line of inquiry.
A new study - which has now been underway for a few months (so apologies for this late post) - seeks to add to this evidence through detailed observation of how individual students and researchers in Business and Economics use a number of information resources in their area (such as Business Source Premier).
The aim is to observe how individuals react to and use particular interfaces and then to explore those behaviours through structured interviews.
The work is being conducted by Middlesex University and is being complemented by an analysis of Web logs for a selection of Business and Economics e-books and e-journals by CIBER.
A report of the findings is expected during the autumn.
For further information, please visit the project Web page on the JISC Web site.
Towards the academic library of the future - expressions of interest by 8 July 09
We’re working in partnership with SCONUL, RIN, RLUK and the British Library on an initiative:
• to gather and analyse evidence about current and future trends that are likely to have an impact on the future of academic and research libraries in the UK; and
• to formulate strategic responses to help libraries respond creatively to key changes in the wider environment, so that they continue to develop and sustain effective levels and types of information services to support students and researchers in the HE and related sectors.
We’re currently seeking expressions of interest to lead and manage the activity which will use a variety of futures tools and techniques, such as horizon-scanning; trend and driver analysis; scenario analysis; attractiveness grids; and/or value chain analysis. Prospective consultants may wish to suggest other approaches. Whatever approaches are adopted, a key feature of the programme should be that seeks the active participation of as wide a range as possible of people in the library and information sectors, along with users and other stakeholders from across the higher education and research sectors, and their engagement in helping to
• identify, review and assess key trends and underlying drivers likely to affect scholarly libraries, and their use by students and researchers in the years ahead;
• formulate and test scenarios to assess current policies, processes and services, the likely impact of future developments, and the issues and choices facing decision-makers; and
• draft a series of authoritative papers setting out possible futures for library and information services in supporting institutional teaching, learning and research strategies, and the steps required if those futures are to be realised.
The success of the initiative will depend on securing contributions from people with a wide range of views and perspectives who are prepared to experiment with ideas, to challenge existing assumptions, to ask awkward questions, and to test possible impacts.
The contract let will be funded up to a level of £120,000 (exlcuding VAT) and will run from September 2009 to April 2011.
Expressing interest:
Expressions of interest should simply take the form of an email indicating a name and full contact details. Following the outcome of this call, the RIN will issue an ITT to those who have expressed an interest. A full project specification and tendering requirements will then be issued.
The deadline for expressions of interest is 8 July 2009.
Expressions of interest should be directed to Aaron Griffiths (aaron.griffiths@rin.ac.uk). Please also contact Aaron is you have any questions relating to this work.
JISC has recently taken forward a campaign to help raise some of the related issues.
Web Services and repositories
I attended a workshop on June 2 on the use of Web Services to enable interoperability between repositories, repository services and other systems. The workshop was organised by the Ethos project (Electronic Theses Online). Most attendees were from a repository manager or developer background.
[Update: the presentations (including audio recording) at this event are now available]
As a number of speakers noted, the term ‘Web Services’ is a very broad one. The main focus of the day was on the use of a number of specific protocols and approaches to provide ’services’:
SWORD for depositing items in repositories
SRU to search for and retrieve items
And REST for passing data between servers.
Using such ’services’ enables repository services to be used from within environments other than the repository itself (so, if you wanted to deposit an item in a repository from within a research management application of some kind, for example). It also enables repositories to use other systems’ services. One example given of this was look up of file format information from the National Archives’ PRONOM database of file formats.
From discussion, the general view appeared to be that Web Services do have a role to play in aiding integration of repositories with other systems and avoiding ’silos’. However, achieving such integration raises issues such as:
- having sufficient access to technical expertise
- ensuring good communication between repository managers and developers
- focussing on real user needs.
None of these are easy issues to address. Two of the speakers came from institutions which are members of the Scottish Digital Library Consortium and they noted the value of libraries ‘clubbing together’ to share available technical expertise and resources.
The ‘library management system’: a round up of some (fairly) recent initiatives
This is rather a long post - but it is on a big subject!
Last year saw the publication by the JISC and SCONUL of a major report on library management systems used in UK higher education. A lot has happened since. So, I thought it might be useful to post an update - even a long one - on some related recent JISC activities.
The LMS report highlighted a number of issues to be addressed in order to make library resources as visible and accessible as possible in the digital environment, including:
• integrating library systems and other university systems so that relevant data can be shared between them and users can access services in different ways (within university portals, virtual learning environments, etc.)
• making library metadata (catalogue records) available to other services (such as web search engines and collaborative web tools) so that information about library resources can be easily found, used and personalised by users where and how they choose
• using library usage data (information about how many times an item has been borrowed and by what kind of user, for example) to indicate how individual library resources are being used, thereby providing a basis for user ‘rating’ for library resources – and doing this at a ‘network level’ (so not limited to one library) in order to have access to enough meaningful data
• improving the quality of search interfaces and reducing the number of different systems which users need to search to access the full range of resources available to them.
JISC is just one partner in seeking to address these issues with vendors of library systems developing new discovery tools, OCLC’s recent announcement about using WorldCat as the basis for effectively a shared library management system and SCONUL investigating the potential for shared library management systems, for example.
So, what has been happening on the JISC front?
The TILE (Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework) project has investigated the use of Web 2.0 tools by library services, outlined a possible new model (a ‘library domain model’) for how library services might fit in the wider information environment (to help inform further development of library systems) and proposed testing the extraction and combination of usage data from a number of university systems to provide the bases of user ratings for library resources.
As you may know from some earlier posts, reports from the TILE project are now available on the JISC web site and there is a workshop on the domain model planned for June 19. Further work is planned to test extracting and combining usage data as noted above.
Meanwhile, EDINA and MIMAS are developing the search interfaces for SUNCAT (the national serials catalogue) and COPAC (the national research libraries’ catalogue) as part of the D2D (Discovery to Delivery) project. The work includes providing Web 2.0 and other tools to enable users to share metadata and to link from bibliographic records to ‘the thing itself’ (or a means of obtaining it). The project partly builds on the recommendations and findings of the DPIE (Development of Personalisation for the Information Environment) investigations of 2008.
Continuing the theme of ‘joining up’, the JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group recently commissioned a study into the existing and potential links between library management systems and digital repositories.
And the winning entry at the recent Dev8D Web Developers event was a prototype reading list system which aimed to make it easier to extract information for reading lists from catalogues, Amazon and elsewhere and then make the reading lists available in different applications.
Following the major ‘Google generation’ report of early 2008, efforts also continue to understand what information services people actually need with the launch of a new British Library/JISC study of young researchers’ use of online and physical information environments. JISC’s Publishers’ Action Group has also commissioned an observational study of how individual students and academic staff in Business and Economics use electronic information resources.
So, there is a lot going on - and that is just within a JISC context. If nothing else, the activity in this area illustrates that the ‘library management system’ is even more the subject of debate than it was when the JISC/SCONUL study was commissioned not so very long ago …
Modelling the ‘library domain’: a consultative workshop on June 19
The challenge of making library resources visible and accessible in the Web 2.0 environment was a major focus of last year’s JISC/SCONUL study of Library Management Systems.
The JISC TILE (Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework) project was subsequently commissioned to draft a high level ‘library domain model’ which could be used to further thinking about the functions and processes that library systems need to support in future.
We are now organising a workshop to consult on the domain model proposed, and how it might be used in the future.
Who should attend?
The workshop is intended for a mix of senior and middle library managers in a range of roles (so, not confined to colleagues with formal IT/systems management responsibilities).
Where and when is it?
Friday 19th June 2009 at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, central London.
What is the programme for the day?
The programme consists of a mixture of presentations and group work.
How do I register?
Due to the consultative nature of this workshop, we have a limited number of places. If you would like to attend, please register your interest by 18th May 2009, and we will contact you thereafter to confirm your place or add your name to a waiting list.
Library round up: event, discussion and new domain model
This post more or less repeats some JISC news items (sorry) but I wanted to make sure readers of this blog saw some JISC library related activity that has been discussed, published and presented this week. In particular I want to draw attention to Peter Murray-Rust’s blog posts on the Library of the Future, in case anyone wants to contribute before he speaks at the JISC/Bodleian Library event on 2 April. You can register to attend the Libraries of the Future event in person or in Second Life. Related information:
Overview. Speakers. Registration. Agenda.
Event tag: LOTF09
Peter has blogged some ideas and sought feedback (you’ll need to scroll through a few pages on his blog to see all of the discussion). He has identified some people and organizations that, as a scientist he personally considers relevant to librarians / libraries of the future. He only includes a couple of librarians; the list of those identified leans towards computer scientists not information scientists. In general (my crude summary of a wide ranging discussion!) he appears to be highlighting the need for a revolutionary attitude, more experimentation and for academic librarians to be promoters of good policy and practice with regards to ownership and access to scholarship, and the need to move to the web.
“…the librarians of the future. They build vital, communal, information resources. They invite collaboration, either directly or implicitly. They overthrow conventional wisdom and entrenched systems and interests.”
The blog discussion is interesting, there have been quite a few contributions, and I think it points to the importance of communication between librarians, computers scientists, researchers, learners and university managers.
And to briefly draw your attention to some other library focused activity from JISC this week:
The TILE (Towards the Implementation of Library 2.0 and the eFramework) project report and briefing paper has been published. This includes a library domain model developed to identify what the library processes are in the networked environment in the light of changing behaviour and information provision. The work has focused in particular on two increasingly important areas in delivering relevant services, these are context/personalization and contribution. There will be further consultation on the domain model via a workshop later in the year.
Finally at the JISC Conference this week there was a session on the Future of Academic Library – this discussed issues such as shared services, the evolving library collection and introduced a collaboration between JISC, SCONUL, BL, RLUK and RIN to consult and develop positions on the way in which libraries can respond to change.