Users and Uses of Digital Libraries Interoperability, federated and metasearching

1
Users and Uses of Digital Libraries/
Interoperability, federated and metasearching
2
Major issues in human-centred DL design

• Human information needs
• Tasks arising from those needs
• Human information seeking and searching behaviour
• How digital libraries affect subsequent human
  information behaviour

3
Designers vs. evaluators

• Designers
• Who are the users?
• Who are the potential users?
• What are the common needs?
• How can those needs be mapped onto tasks?
• How will the new system change needs (and tasks)?

• Evaluators
• Who is impacted?
• Who and what may influence impact?
• What are the indicators of impact?
• How can indicators be measured?
• How do impacts influence future generations and
  systems?

Marchionini et al., 2003
4
Elliss behavioural model of information seeking
(1987)
5

• Who are the users of digital libraries?

6
Who are the users of DLs?

• The general public
• Primary, secondary and tertiary educational
  institutions
• Industrial users
• Manufacturing users
• Professional users
• High level university, corporate or institutional
  research users

7
DL user study Early Canadiana Online (ECO)

• Web-based questionnaire
• One hundred and fifty-nine people responded to
  the user survey
• Variables investigated
• Age
• Gender
• Areas of study
• Frequency of use
• Type of use

Digital Libraries over Time a follow-up survey
of Early Canadiana Online (Cherry Duff, 2002)
8
Main questions

• Questions about the person's use of the ECO
  materials in general
• Questions about how the person used an item from
  ECO in the current session
• Use of the ECO web site as a whole
• Use of ECO in teaching and scholarly research
• General questions about the person's use of
  computers and the Internet, and demographics.

9
Uses of ECO materials
10
ECO Reading behaviour
11
The use of introduction, index or table of
contents
12
The use of ECO in research and teaching
13
Use and users of electronic library resources
(Tenopir, 2003)
Council on Library and Information Resources
14
Population

• Students and faculty
• Scholars and clinicians
• College students/ general public
• Scientists and social scientists (academic and
  non-academic)
• Library users at institutions of higher education
  (students and faculty)

15
Methods

• Transaction logs
• Surveys
• Focus groups
• Interviews
• critical incident
• Observation
• Experimental
• Natural setting
• Usage statistics

16
Results summary

• Both browsing and searching remain important
  information-seeking behaviors
• Most subject experts have a core group of journal
  titles
• Print is still used for some reading and is part
  of research in almost every discipline.
• E-book use is still in the very early stages.

17
Results summary (cont.)

• Most users employ a variety of sources to find
  journal articles, but high school and lower
  division college students most frequently turn
  first to the free Web and Web search engines
• Students exercise some quality judgments about
  materials they retrieve from the Internet

18
More findings (cont.)

• Students prefer to access electronic resources
  through the library from home.
• Scientists in government laboratories and
  companies also rely on electronic and paper
  journals for research.

19
Digital journal library usage

• Research at University College London
• Exploring the impact of the digital information
  services on academics and researchers.
• Investigated about a million users making ten
  million item requests
• Two metrics used
• search sessions conducted and
• items viewed or requests made.

20
Results

• Users make use of such services as Pubmed, for
  the first trawl
• Full-text HTML pages viewed more than list of
  issues, TOC and full-text PDF
• 50 of the users make use of table of contents or
  list of issues
• Researchers accounted for 30 of users,
  professors and teachers 22, undergraduates 26,
  Postgraduates 5
• University, hospitals, Government, non-for-profit
  

21
Interoperability Federated searching Meta-search
ing
22
Interoperability definition

• Interoperability is the ability of a system
  or a product to work with other systems or
  products without special effort on the part of
  the customer. Interoperability becomes increasing
  important for information technology products as
  the concept that "The network is the computer"
  becomes a reality. For this reason, the term is
  widely used in product marketing descriptions.

23
Factors affecting interoperability (Moen, 2001)

• Multiple and disparate operating and Information
  retrieval systems
• Multiple protocols
• Multiple metadata schemes
• Multiple data formats
• Multiple languages and character sets
• Multiple vocabularies, ontologies, and disciplines

24
Types of interoperability

• Technical interoperability
• Semantic interoperability
• Political and human interoperability
• Legal interoperability
• International interoperability

25
How to Interoperate?
MARC
METS
OAI
Subject schemes
Standards
Standards
HTTP
Classification schemes
SRU
Z39.50
Standards
Software
Interfaces
Subject headings
OpenURL
Thesauri
SFX
XML HTML
Systems
Dublin Core
26
Approaches to interoperability

• The conventional approach
• Wise people develop standards protocols,
  formats, etc.
• Everybody implements the standards.
• This creates an integrated, distributed system.
• Unfortunately ...
• Standards are expensive to adopt.
• Concepts are continually changing.
• Systems are continually changing.
• Different people have different ideas

Arms, 2002
27
Levels of interoperability
28
Parallel search
Metasearch
Cross-database search
Broadcast search
Federated search
29
NISO 2005
30
Metasearch general function

• Metasearch services accept a query
• Send the query to multiple content providers
• Receive search results from multiple collections
• Present results to the user

31
Effectiveness of metasearch

• Effective metasearch requires agreements between
  content providers and service providers
• Transport protocol (s)
• Query language (s) (syntax and semantics)
• Metadata schemas (syntax and semantics)
• Metadata quality
• Intellectual property rights issues
• Authorization / authentication
• Disclosure / discovery of collections and services

Andy Powell, 2004
32
Meta search services

• Commercial
• Metalib
• Muse Global
• Proquest Serial Solutions WebFeat
• Endeca
• Open source
• Libraryfind a meta search engine

33
OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative- Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting)

• Was introduced in 2001
• An initiative to develop and promote
  interoperability standards to facilitate the
  efficient dissemination of content
• A protocol for harvesting metadata about
  resources residing in separate repositories
• A harvester is operated by a service provider as
  a means of collecting metadata from repositories
• Examples
• DLIST http//dlist.sir.arizona.edu/
• OAIster http//oaister.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/b
  ib-idx?coaisterpagesimple
• OAI Registered data providers
  http//www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites

34
OpenURL

• OpenURL is a URL that transports resource
  metadata, designed to support access from an
  information resource (source) to library service
  components (targets).
• A link resolver parses the elements of an OpenURL
  and provides the appropriate services that have
  been identified by the library.
• A source is generally a bibliographic citation or
  bibliographic record representing a work that can
  be used to generate an OpenURL. A target is a
  resource or service that helps satisfy user's
  information need.
• Example http//www.google.ca/search?hlenqalis
  hiribtnGGoogleSearchmeta

35
OpenURL link resolver, Qin Zhu, 2004
36
SFX

• Context-sensitive link server from Ex Libris
• SFX allows libraries to define the links between
  information resources
• The resources become fully integrated in the
  overall library service

37
SRU (Search and Retrieval via URL)

• is a standard search protocol for Internet search
  queries, utilizing CQL (Common Query Language),
• a standard query syntax for representing queries.
  
• The Library of Congress serves as the maintenance
  agency for these standards
• Example http//z3950.loc.gov7090/voyager?version
  1.1operationsearchRetrievequerydinosaurmaxim
  umRecords1recordSchemadc

38
Analysis of an SRU

• Base URL http//z3950.loc.gov7090/voyager?
• Search part
• version1.1operationsearchRetrievequerydinosau
  rmaximumRecords1recordSchemadc