Dr Paul Miller Interoperability Focus

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A Framework for Access to the Nations Heritage
Dr Paul MillerInteroperability
Focus p.miller_at_ukoln.ac.uk www.ukoln.ac.uk/
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See www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/
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Topics to Consider

• What is the nations Heritage ?
• Trustees of the Heritage
• Moving Online
• What is Metadata?
• Some UK experiences
• Internationalisation
• Access to the Nations Heritage
• Generalising a model
• Conclusions

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What is the nations Heritage ?
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The nations heritage is

• Physical
• Tangible
• Enriching
• Inclusive
• National
• For us
• Finite
• Valuable

• Digital
• Ephemeral
• Uncomfortable
• Excluding
• International
• For our children
• Ever-expanding
• Expensive

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The nations heritage is
Where we come from
Where we are
An indication of where we are going ?
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Valuing the Heritage?

• Cultural memory, which is documented in the
  collections of museums, libraries and archives
  throughout the world, is a vital part of the
  human endeavour. It represents the knowledge
  accumulated through the generations, and enables
  humanity to build on the achievements of those
  who have gone before us. Cultural memory
• Benefits individuals, by promoting a sense of
  identity through shared cultural values and by
  supporting the quest for lifelong learning
• Benefits communities, by promoting economic
  prosperity and fostering the understanding that
  leads to a civil and just society and
• Benefits humanity as a whole, by promoting the
  values we share as global citizens and by
  increasing our capacity to connect with one
  another to meet universal challenges.
• Museums, libraries and archivesoften called
  memory institutionsare trusted organizations
  that collectively document the entire range of
  human experience and expression. Memory
  institutions are engaged in the important work
  of
• Capturing, authenticating, and making sense of
  cultural memory
• Preserving the human record for future
  generations and
• Sharing knowledge to support education and
  learning.

See www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ccs/positions/
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Trustees of the Heritage
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Memory Institutions

• Museums Galleries, Libraries, Archives
• Hold the memory of the Nation in trust
• Actively interpret
• (Usually) under sell themselves
• Possibly perpetuate organisational structures
  irrelevant to the user
• Offer a human side of Government ?

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Some facts

• In the UK, more people visit museums than go to
  theme parks and pop concerts
• Visiting libraries is more popular than going to
  the cinema
• There are over 4,000 public library branches in
  the UK
• The vast majority will be connected to the
  Peoples Network by 2003
• 70 already are.

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Moving Online
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Heritage Online

• Placed online, large parts of the Heritage can
  become
• available to the Nation, 24/7
• accessible
• democratised, and available equally to the
  inhabitants of Wellington, and of a small
  village on the South Island
• a powerful advert for New Zealand
• comparable to similar resources from elsewhere
• viable as enablers and facilitators of Learning,
  both formal and lifelong.

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Some assumptions

• Having access to digital surrogates of cultural
  heritage material is useful and desirable
• The public sector has a role to play in this,
  beyond simply granting digitisation rights to
  Microsoft
• Availability of regional/national/international
  corpora of material is more useful to the user
  than hundreds or thousands of individual sites
• Metadata is key to making the vision reality.

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What is Metadata?
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What is Metadata?

• meaningless jargon
• ora fashionable, and terribly misused, term for
  what weve always done
• ora means of turning data into information
• anddata about data
• andthe name of a person (Tony Blair)
• andthe title of a book (The Name of the Rose).

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What is Metadata?

• Metadata may be applied to almost anything
• People
• Places
• Objects
• Concepts
• Web pages
• Databases.

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What is Metadata?

• Resource Discovery Metadata fulfils three main
  functions
• Description of resource content
• What is it?
• Description of resource form
• How is it constructed?
• Description of resource use
• Can I afford it?.

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Metadata is

• Cataloguing made cool
• But still a bit geeky?
• An important driver for the information economy ?
• A panacea in the battle against information
  overload ?
• Potentially useful as an affordable and
  costeffective means of unlocking a wealth of
  resources ?.

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Some assumptions

• Having access to digital surrogates of cultural
  heritage material is useful and desirable
• The public sector has a role to play in this,
  beyond simply granting digitisation rights to
  Microsoft
• Availability of regional/national/international
  corpora of material is more useful to the user
  than hundreds or thousands of individual sites
• Metadata is key to making the vision reality.

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Some more assumptions

• Distribution is better than centralisation
• Portals are good
• Thick portals are better
• A single portal is bad
• Shared middleware services play a key role
• The problem is bigger than the UK or New Zealand.

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Some UK experiences
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Further and Higher Education
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JISC

• Joint Information Systems Committee
• to stimulate and enable the costeffective
  exploitation of information systems and to
  provide a high quality national network
  infrastructure
• development not research
• Funded by topslice from the Further (college)
  and Higher (university) Education Funding
  Councils for England, Scotland, Wales, and
  Northern Ireland
• Funds the Network, eLib, the JISC Data Centres,
  UKOLN, the Focus posts, DNER Programme, etc..

See www.jisc.ac.uk/
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The current picture
Content (local and remote)

• Many different services
• Each has own user interface
• Each has a learning curve

End-user
Slide by Andy Powell of UKOLN
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The DNER

• Distributed National Electronic Resource
• Policy aspiration of the Joint Information
  Systems Committee
• Intended to provide greater access to JISCs
  Current Content Collection
• RDN
• AHDS
• MIMAS, EDINA, BIDS/Ingenta, Data Archive
• EDUSERVE
• COPAC
• eLib projectsetc.

Information Environment
See www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/
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Building the IE

• Z39.50 as part of the glue
• Thus, JISC funding of Bath Profile development,
  working closely with NLC, NLA and others
• Also placing Open Archives model within overall
  architecture
• Technical Standards document prepared by UKOLN
  and JISC
• applied initially to projects started by a
  NZ30,000,000 funding allocation in 2000
  intended to make resources useful for learning
  and teaching
• further applied to other programmes as they begin
• Technical requirements for external contributors
  also written.

See www.dner.ac.uk/arch/
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Towards an Architecture

• Need for contextualisation
• What are people doing
• And what are the best technologies to help them?
• How can we move towards the appearance of
  seamless service?
• No one-fit solution.

See www.dner.ac.uk/arch/
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Towards an architecture

• Search
• Z39.50 and the Bath Profile
• Harvest
• OAI
• Alert
• RSS
• Shared Middleware Services
• Authenticate, Authorise, Collection Description,
  User Preference, Institutional Preference

See www.dner.ac.uk/arch/
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JISCs Information Environment
Content providers
Provisionlayer
Shared services
Authentication
Fusionlayer
Authorisation
Broker/Aggregator
Broker/Aggregator
Collectn Desc
Service Desc
Portal
Portal
Portal
Presentationlayer
Resolver
Instn Profile
End-user
Slide by Andy Powell of UKOLN
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Architectural summary
provision
content
shared services
brokers and aggregators
m2m
fusion
infrastructure
publishing tools
portals
registries terminology indexing resolution authent
ication authorisation citation linking
presentation
Slide by Andy Powell of UKOLN
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Building the IE

• Construction of various Portals to facilitate
  usercentric access
• JISC Portal ?
• Data Centre Portals (EDINA, MIMAS)
• Subject Portals (the RDN, ADS, etc.)
• Data Type Portals (images, movies, sound)
• Institutional Portals
• Personal Portals (Pauls web!)
• Also providing other access to discrete resources.

See www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/
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National or Local?

• JISC building various national services,
  including portals
• Institutions also building portals,
  Managed/Virtual Learning Environments, myLibrary
  services, etc.
• Where do we see the role for all?

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See www.rdn.ac.uk/
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See port.hull.ac.uk/ soon!
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Lifelong Learning
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nofdigi

• New Opportunities Fund receives money from the
  UKs National Lottery
• nofdigi programme committing NZ150,000,000 over
  23 years to digitisation of learning materials
  for use in lifelong learning
• UKOLN providing coordinated (and partially
  mandatory) technical guidelines across the
  programme, and a support service.

See www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/
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nofdigi

• Managed Programme
• Initial call for proposals closed January 2000
• Shortlisted projects informed summer 2000
• Given until January 2001 to submit detailed
  business plans, conforming to technical
  guidelines
• Over 130 projects funded summer 2001
• Most projects to run for 1824 months
• Required to maintain services for at least 36
  months beyond end of funding.

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Culture OnLine

• Announced September 2000
• Culture Onlines remit would be to use digital
  technologies to widen access to the resources of
  the arts and cultural sector, for the purposes of
  learning and enjoyment both at school and
  throughout life.
• Building directly upon NOF, and the lessons it
  teaches
• Awaiting final decision on the way in which this
  initiative will move forward.

See www.cultureonline.gov.uk/
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The Middleware debate

• Recognition of the need for infrastructure
• But how far should the centre either mandate or
  provide this?
• Search technologies
• Harvesting/crosssearch
• Metadata
• Shared terminological controls
• Authentication/authorisation
• MLE/VLE interaction
• Collection Level Description
• etc.
• Should the centre only provide middleware, and
  leave the citizen/user-facing work to downstream
  organisations?

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Reaching the Citizen
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Government

• to make the UK the best environment in the world
  for e-commerce by 2002
• to ensure that everyone who wants it has access
  to the internet by 2005
• to make all government services available
  electronically by 2005
• Focus upon services
• Focus upon the citizen
• Focus upon the Joined Up approach
• Recognition of multichannel architecture
• By 2004 the Internet will be the dominant means
  of enabling ready access to government
  information, services and processes

See www.e-envoy.gov.uk/publications/int_comparison
s.htm
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Focus on services

• Deliver services to the citizen
• Services rather than resources
• transactional web sites
• Not just about finding documents on a web site
• Change of address service
• https//www.addressingthechange.com
• www.ihavemoved.com/
• www.simplymove.co.uk/.

See www.gateway.gov.uk/
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Focus on the Citizen

• Move away from the silo mentality
• Citizens need/want access to information/services
  /resources
• These exist in different parts of local and
  national government, organised according to
  internal needs or procedures, and packaged
  according to particular house styles and
  conventions
• None of which helps the citizen who just wants a
  new wheely bin (a.k.a Garbage can/ trash
  can/ dumpster ?)

See www.ukonline.gov.uk/
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Recognise a multichannel future

• The web is not the only game in town
• Mobile phones/ WAP/ 3G
• PDAs
• Digital TV
• Telephone call centres
• One stop shop dropin centres
• High street information kiosks
• The Post Office
• Banks
• Traditional access mechanisms
• So create content once for largely automated
  repackaging and repurposing
• XML Schema/ XSL, etc .

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The eGIF

• eGovernment Interoperability Framework
• Technical standards and policies at the heart of
  eGovernment
• Conformance is mandatory across the Public Sector
• Adoption of Internet and Web standards across
  government
• XML/XSL, plus governmentspecific schemas
• Change of Address service, for example, utilises
  XML Schemas to pass details between participants.

See www.govtalk.gov.uk/
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The eGIF

• eGovernment Interoperability Framework
• Version 4 released in April
• Incorporates Metadata Framework (Dublin Core),
  the UK Government Metadata Element Set, and the
  Government Category List.

See www.govtalk.gov.uk/
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Internationalisation
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Level 7

• An activity in need of a name!
• Organised with support from CIMI and Resource
• Recognised growing synergies between content
  creation activities globally
• Gathered funders and programme managers in London
• Reported in issue 5 of Cultivate Interactive.

See www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ccs/
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The Cultural Content Forum ?

• Met in Washington in March
• around 40 representatives from Europe, Canada,
  USA, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan
• Clear interest in a user focus
• new work item to gather and explore existing
  user evaluation work, in order to develop a
  better picture of what users want.

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Access to the Nations Heritage
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A premise

• We want to provide useful services toour users.
• These should be
• Usable
• Functional
• Fit-for-purpose
• yet cool and attractive
• Sustainable
• Interoperable
• And could be
• Informational
• Transactional
• Technical standards are the dull but necessary
  reality for making this happen.

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Generalising a model
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In search of solutions

• A common approach
• Mandated as a condition of grant?
• nofdigi technical standards and guidelines
• Although evidence of voluntary adoption
• DNER Learning Teaching Programme technical
  guidelines
• Canadian Digital Cultural Content Initiative
  technical guidelines
• eGIF
• An open approach
• Avoidance of proprietary solutions
• Based on emerging or established standards
• XML based. Mappable to Dublin Core.

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In search of solutions

• A consensusbased approach
• Need community adoption and understanding
• Data creators and providers need a sense of
  ownership
• An evolutionary approach
• Channels
• New standards
• New user requirements
• Remember preservation.

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An architecture

• Integrated information environment is complex
• An overarching architecture helps to place
  individual features in context
• searching
• harvesting
• alerting
• Shared middleware
• Common identifiers, etc.

See www.dner.ac.uk/architecture/
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Part of a model

• Placing detailed descriptions of all cultural
  artefacts online infeasible?
• Expensive
• A big job!
• Leads to information overload
• Collection Level Description a way forward
• Pointers into collections
• Easier to harmonise across domains
• Achievable.

See www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/
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The Big Issue(s)

• Language
• Whether technical or vernacular
• Terminological control
• Shared subject terms
• Certification/ Authenticity
• How do I know its an authoritative description
  of the Mona Lisa ?
• Infrastructure
• How to enable crosssearch?
• Meeting the requirements of new users
• Largely let down by our current offerings.

See www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/miller/
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Conclusions
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Conclusions

• The Heritage matters
• a digitised Heritage may be exploited in new
  ways, by new and old markets
• Effective exploitation requires
• Cooperation, collaboration, and consensus
  building
• shared vision
• new ways of working
• institutional and organisational change
• is library a meaningful concept to the learner?
• is museum?
• an interoperable technical base
• We need to be responsive to the needs of our
  users
• cultural tourist, student, lifelong learner,
  professional .

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A Framework for Access to the Nations Heritage
Dr Paul MillerInteroperability
Focus p.miller_at_ukoln.ac.uk www.ukoln.ac.uk/