Catherine Grout

1
OAI and potential the whole, the complicate,
the amassing harmony ____________ the dark
encroachment of that old catastrophe/Why should
she give her bounty to the dead?

• Catherine Grout
• Assistant Director for Development, JISC/DNER
• catherine.grout_at_kcl.ac.uk

2
JISC/DNER and OAI?

• BROADER CONTEXT of OAI
• More efficient way of achieving interoperability
• Signifying and bringing about cultural change
• JISC wishes to contribute to this broader agenda
• FOR THE JISC/DNER
• Technical approach to cementing DNER architecture
  and building the JISCs Information Environment
• Way of leveraging the community resource

3
JISC/DNER and OAI?

• TODAY
• Developing the agenda for e-print archives (and
  other materials)
• Looking at ways institutional archives, services
  and funders can move forward together

4
OAI and the JISC/DNER Technical Development Agenda
5
What is the Information Environment?

• Key aspect of JISC 5 Year Strategyto build an
  on-line information environment providing secure
  and convenient access to a comprehensive
  collection of scholarly and educational
  material".
• How does it relate to the DNER?We can
  characterise an Information Environment as the
  set of network services that support publishing
  and use of information resources
• DNER refers to distributed learning and research
  resources
• The Information Environment is needed to enable
  students and staff to access and use those
  resources in ways meaningful to them

6
What are the high level strategic aims for the
Information Environment?

• Fit to serve all kinds of digital content
• Fully supporting the submission and sharing of
  research and learning objects.
• Providing a range of meaningful, rich and
  innovative methods of accessing electronic
  materials.
• A collaborative landscape of networked service
  providers who work together to seamlessly cater
  for the needs of the community on a national
  basis.

7
What architectural elements does it contain?
Provision the storage and delivery of Content
Infrastructure Shared Middleware Services which
support other activities
Fusion the bringing together of Content from
multiple providers either by machine to machine
Brokers and Aggregators or Portals which are
visible to end users
Presentation interaction with the end users in
a direct and visible manner to give them access
to Content
8
Current service architecture
Content (local and remote)
Web
Web
Web
Web
Authentication
Authorisation
End-user needs to join services together manually
- as well as learning multiple user interfaces
End-user
9
Searching in the Future
Content
Web
Web
Web
Web
Authentication
Broker or Aggregator
Authorisation
End-user is automatically presented with
relevant resources through relevant channels
Collectn Desc.
Portal
Service Desc.
Thesauri
User Profiles
End-user
10
How will people be effected?

• For Students and Staff
• They will have access routes into information in
  ways that make sense to them, e.g by subject,
  learning objective
• They will not have to search multiple websites,
  or just rely on Google or Altavista for a wide
  internet search
• They will be able to proceed more seamlessly from
  discovering information to achieving a learning
  aim
• They will be routed to the most appropriate copy
  of a given resource
• They will be able to contribute to the DNER

11
How will people be effected?

• For Services and Content Providers
• They will be able to make use of shared services
• They will know more about users and their
  preferences
• They will have more easily obtainable information
  about analogous content
• They will be found by more users and their
  content will be more actively used

12
Sharing
Content
Open Archives Initiative
Web
Web
Web
Web
Authentication
Authorisation
Aggregator
Collectn Desc.
Service Desc.
Portal
Thesauri
HTTP
User Profiles
End-user
13
OAI key approach for developing interoperability

• Z39.50 is also an approach that we continue to
  support
• Is already implemented in some places to achieve
  interoperability of JISC/DNER content services
• Useful for approaches to develop in parallel
• OAI is simple approach to sharing metadata
  records does not rely on sending and receiving
  queries to distributed content hosts at time of
  searching
• Looks as if it may have some efficiency
  advantages over Zed
• Will need support and development to flourish

14
OAI key approach for developing interoperability

• Portals are a key area of investment over the
  next period
• They will use harvested metadata to created
  tailored services by subject, resource type,
  learning aim
• By portals we mean cross searching based on deep
  metadata (concept of deep and shallow portals)

15
How will the technical development process take
place?
16
Leveraging the community resource
17
JISC/DNER scope by content
External
Public libraries
Institutional
Web pages
home pages
Museums
Funded
theses
research papers
Map data
courseware
Full-text
images
Primary Content
statistics
Northern Light
Secondary Content
RDN
AI
COPAC
OPACs
Institutional gateways
Amazon
Yahoo
Google
18
Content submission mechanisms

• Approaches to submission and sharing of content
• Community resources will be more relevant
  resources
• The community is rich in libraries, archives and
  museums
• Providing mechanisms for community content to be
  brought together in specific ways
• Adding actual content to an existing resource
• Making visible to machines for searching,
  metadata about a relevant resource (OAI)
• Exchanging content to make multiple learning
  objects
• Enabling technologies need to be implemented but
  a lot of human and organisational barriers to
  overcome

19
JISC and OAI, the future?

• Achieve a metadata sharing infastructure
• Cement DNER architecture
• Facilitate (fund) service providers to implement
  OAI
• Benchmarking exercise, service provider
  architecture
• RDN (Resource Discovery Network) - internal
  sharing using OAI
• MIMAS - exposing collection descriptions
• More investment needed to implement this approach
  more widely

20
JISC and OAI, the future?

• Today is mainly about leveraging the community
  resource (?)
• Support for the institutional agenda for using
  OAI for e-print archives and the disclosure of
  other assets
• Some current support for e-print work, e.g.
• Open Sourcing e-prints.org software
• Providing support for open source software more
  broadly
• Open Citation Project (JISC/NSF/DLI)
• What else should we (collectively) be doing?

21
Roles

• What can institutions do?
• What support do they need
• What can service providers do?
• (particularly given parallel investments in
  portalisation)
• What can centralised funding practically support?
• How do we help seed and develop a sustainable
  model for this activity
• How might we scale this up to include other types
  of community archives

22
Outcomes (?)

• Practical outcomes
• tools?
• Guidelines?
• best practice case studies?
• pilot projects?
• Open Archiving will not get off the ground until
  the day I can go to a website, download
  open-archiving software, then say make archive
  and an interoperable, OAI-compliant archive is up
  and running and ready to be filled (2nd OAI
  archive meeting participant)