Transcript MS Powerpoint 97/200 format

Librarians And The Web
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath, BA2 7AY
Email: [email protected]
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries,
the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further
Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the
European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
The Role Of Librarians
The Library Community:
• Is driving the Web due to its long-standing
involvement with information management
• Is another user department (like medicine and law)
which needs to follow the Web management
community
If the latter, it affects the development of your
institutional and departmental Web services
The Library is good at:
• Searching
• Cataloguing (metadata)
• Involvement with Users
But can emphasise the client
side of Web too much
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Background To The Web
The Web:
• Invented by an English computer scientist working in
Europe
Tim Berners-Lee developed the
3 key architectural components:
• Data format (HTML)
• Transport (HTTP)
• Addressing (URIs/URLs)
He wasn’t a librarian so he forgot
about the missing component metadata
Metadata
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HTML
HTTP
URIs
Dangers
Possible dangers:
• Library community thinks its driving
developments, but misses the new stuff
• Thinks Web has stabilised and misses the
new stuff
• Becomes over-reliant on an application
(“here’s how I developed my Intranet using
Notscape content management system”)
• Library takes a departmental view when an
organisational strategy is needed
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The New Stuff
New stuff to think about:
• HTML is dead (see article at
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/web-focus/)
• XML is the answer
• You’ll then get XSLT, modularity, richer hyperlinking
through XLink and XPointer, …
• Sounds scary but …
• XHTML gives you an easy route to XML
• You will know about problems with URLs:
“the book is third from the left on the fourth row on Level 4
of the Aberdeen Polytechnic Library.”
“Aberdeen Polytechnic no longer exists? Sorry that’s life in
the Library world ”
So you’ll need to know about DOIs, OpenURLs, …
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Kill Off The HTML Authoring Tool
HTML authoring tools should be killed off:
• They give a file-oriented view of things
• They may make it difficult to:
– Make use of fragments
– Manage collections of Resources
– Deploy new services (e.g. personalisation) on new devices
(e-book, WAP, etc.)
Think about:
• CSS (you should know this)
• Server-side includes (standard programming
concept of reuse through subroutines)
• Server-side scripting
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Demise Of Joe Homepage?
Web is great:
• Easy concepts, easy to use, easy to create
But:
• Professional, fully-functional services will be
complex
• If you continue with the FrontPage approach
you’ll make problems for yourself next year
• You’ll probably need to know about RDF, DOIs,
URNs, WML, XSLT, CC/PP, XML Schemas and
Namespaces, SOAP, UDDI and other TLAs and
XTLAs
• You’ll want to provide personalised, accessible
pages (“I’m blue-green colour blind and suffer
from shakes”, …)
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Sounds Scary
Maybe but:
• Perhaps this stuff can be handled by a Content
Management System?
Issues:
• Cost and resource implications (Vignette)
• Open source vs licensed software
• Application dependencies (cf Lotus Notes URLs)
What happens if you don’t do it:
• Commercial sector does public information
• Dotcom companies compete with academic libraries
• The end of the road for libraries? – see
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue27/pub-libs/>
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Conclusions
To conclude:
• Library community do have a valuable role to play
• Library developments should be based on sound
(backend) architectural principles
• Avoid vendor lock-in
• Keep up-to-date with developments
NOTE – see “A Librarian’s Primer to XML and Other
MLs” workshop on Thursday 09:00-16:30
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