Transcript Powerpoint 97/2000 Format

Technologies For Hybrid Libraries:
Implementation Issues
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath, BA2 7AY
This talk looks at what the HE
community is doing and raises some
implementation issues:
• What's happening with searching?
• Deployment models
• Cultural Issues
UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information Commission, the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher 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.
Where Are We Now?
• Analysis of institutional web search
engines carried out in summer 1999
• Report published in
Ariadne web
magazine
• See
<http://www.
ariadne.ac.
uk/issue21/
webwatch/>
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Accessing The Search Engines
Access to institutional
search engines is
available at:
<http://www.
ariadne.ac.uk/
issue21/webwatch
/survey.html>
Information is being
maintained and a
follow-up article will
be published
Could be used as basis
for a metasearch service
of UK Universities
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What Are The Trends?
Institutions seem to be:
• Moving away from aging research-like tools
(Harvest, wwwwais, …)
• Moving towards popular, out-of-a-box solutions
(ht://Dig, Webinator, etc)
• Interested in commercial products, especially for
distributed sites (e.g. Ultraseek)
• Smaller sites are experimenting with third-party
indexes (e.g. using AltaVista)
• Little interest in re-use of search results
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Areas Of Interest
Postings on mailing lists indicate interest in:
• Indexing binary formats (esp. MS Word, PDF, etc.
• Indexing multiple servers
• Managing preferred hits (e.g. PDF over HTML)
Appears to be little interest in:
• Hybrid libraries (apart from usual suspects)
• Cross-searching
• Subject-specific searching
• Moving remote search interface to local server
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Some Exceptions
The Universities for the North East web site provides a
search interface for searching across several web sites –
see <http://www.unis4ne.ac.uk/webadmin/search.htm>
OMNI host search interfaces to
remote medical services – see
<http://www.omni.ac.uk/
other-search/>
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Some Exceptions (2)
• UCISA TLIG have a pilot
index of computing service
documentation
• See
<http://www.ucisa.ac
.uk/TLIG/docs/
docshare.htm>
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Web Gateways
Workshop session on "Managing Your Institutional
Web Gateway":
• Held at JUSW in Sept 1999 – see
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/
workshops/jusw-sep1999/workshop/>
• Many gateways have been forgotten about
• Many don't appear to have quality assurance or
scoping procedures
• Unclear management responsibilities
• Little evidence of use of "portal management"
software (with some exceptions such as Leeds,
Cranfield, etc.)
• Report to be published in Ariadne shortly
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Case Study
http://www.kingston.gov.uk/libs/ref/
Kingston public library has a
well-designed gateway which
uses a backend database.
The top 10 links is an example
of a value-added service
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Approaches to Deployment
A question for University web teams:
"How can the new technologies and standards
be deployed in our environment?"
Should we:
• Ignore them? (Browser x doesn’t do CSS,
authoring tools don’t do RDF, etc.)
• Accept them fully?
• Accept them partly?
• Other alternatives
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Deployment
Do Nothing
Use New
Developments
Cheap – no new software,
additional training, …
Safe
Fails to address performance
or accessibility issues
Difficult to do new stuff
Addresses performance
& accessibility issues
Use "Safe" Developments
Can deploy new types of
Compromise approach
applications
Might be expensive in
Expensive
identifying safe features
Testing needed
A Fourth Way
Backwards
Use of intelligent servers and
compatibility
proxies
issues
Might be expensive
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Complicated?
Cultural Issues
Should we do it ourselves, do it within the open source,
research community, or make use of commercial software?
Do It Ourselves
Exploit enthusiasm
No expensive reporting
mechanisms
How the web first
developed in the UK
Open Source / Community
Use of Linux
Community software such as IMESH
Toolkit <http://www.imesh.org/
toolkit/>
Collaboration with initiatives such as
RDN <http://www.rdn.ac.uk/>
Use of Commercial Products
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Use MS products such as SiteServer
(cf BUILDER)
Use other licensed software (portal
management systems)
Questions
Some questions for general discussion:
• Do we need to develop a hybrid libraries or can we
rely on interfaces to general search engines (such
as AltaVista or a UK-only search engine)?
Many indexing products (Ultraseek, ht://Dig, MS
SiteServer, etc.) can index remote sites.
• Why isn't more of this being done?
• Is it a scalable solution?
Robot Indexers vs. Other Solutions
• What is the preferred solution for the future:
 Robot indexers indexing lots of sites
 Sites providing access using Z39.50 (or an alternative)
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Conclusions
To conclude:
• eLib phase 3 projects seem to be ahead of the
community
• There are various deployment models for new
standards:
Don't implement
 Implement fully
Implement via proxy  Other solutions
• There are a number of approaches to use of
applications to implement new standards
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