Information: from

1
Information from Landscape to
Environment... from Nature to Architecture

• John Paschoud

With acknowledgements to Martin Jenkins (UCISA)
for UK VLE Survey material, and Andy Powell
(UKOLN) for JISC Information Environment material
used in this presentation
TICER International Summer School 2002 Digital
Libraries and the Changing World of Education
2
Where Im coming from

• England
• A research-oriented university library
• A professional background in information
  technology

3
Its the end of a long day, but

• Landscapes and Environments
• Known and unknown space
• Ways the new environment may threaten libraries
• Ways we can exploit the new environment

• Virtual Learning Environments
• Why they may be a threat
• Problems of integrating VLEs and Libraries
• Problems for users in an information landscape
• An architecture for an Information Environment
• Technologies to watch

4
Is it a Landscape?
5
Is it a Landscape?

• Natural and untamed
• Not controlled we are at the mercy of outside
  forces
• An ecology at work - but based on natural
  selection ( market forces???)
• Not policed no rules
• Peoples first (only?) priority is SURVIVAL

6
or an Environment?
7
or an Environment?

• Controlled and managed
• Built to a design
• Based on many artificial economies or
  government intervention
• Rules (and policing) needed to maintain order and
  structures
• People can focus on very specialised tasks/roles
• but depend upon many other specialised people and
  services to keep the infrastructure working

8

• How do we turn a Landscape into an
  Environment?
• Do we want to???

9
What has not changed?
10
How big is our Information Landscape?

• Dealing with known and unknown space
• Is this like measuring the size of the universe?

11
How big is the Internet?
Universal graph of anything to do with the
Internet (see http//www.cybergeography.org/ for
more serious examples)
12
Known and Unknown Space
13
Who uses Google (first)?

• Me!

14
Threats of change

• Search-engines
• Everything! Free! On my desktop!
• Commercial library services
• If we have to pay more for it it must be
  better
• Interfaces to Everything
• Front-ends to library data that are not the
  library system

15
Opportunities of change

• Globalising the library
• Virtual union catalogues and services
• Access from anywhere
• Collaboration between professionals
• The Librarian who never sleeps!
• The Librarian who knows everything!
• Involving new kinds of professionals
• The Library as Scriptorium
• Re-inventing the library role in a university

16

• Changes that are a threat
• (and how to deal with them)
• Changes that are an opportunity

17
Virtual Learning Environments

• Universities are merging libraries with other
  learning resources, and other functions
• VLEs and MLEs are taking over as the default
  content repositories
• Directed learning material is inherently
  different from open library resources
• The role of collecting, managing and giving
  access to information resources is increasingly
  being outsourced

18
UCISA Survey of VLE use in UK

• Conducted March/April 2001
• 89 returns
• 67 institutions
• 81 of institutions are using VLEs
• 29 using one
• 24 using two
• 25 using three
• 3 using four

19
VLEs in use
20
How long have VLEs been used
21
Numbers of students
22
Academic Staff using VLEs
23
Decision making

• Level
• 88 involved at institutional level
• 33 involved at faculty/school level
• Departments involved
• IT Services 96
• Academic 88
• Educational Development 75
• MIS 42

24
Reasons for considering VLEs

• Improving teaching and learning 27
• Widening participation 21
• Distance learning 21
• Flexibility 19
• Cost-effective 16
• Keeping up with the Jones! (5)

25

• What word has not been used in the report of the
  UCISA survey of VLE adoption in UK universities?

Library!
26
VLEs the threat

• integrates all campus technologies provides
  access to personalized, online courses and other
  e-learning resources Plus, academic,
  administrative and communications services for
  traditional and non-traditional learners ...any
  time, any place. helping institutions remain
  competitive today and into the future..
• WebCT website

27
Problems for VLE-Library integration

• VLE systems currently in use by teaching
  academics are closed
• Students can only find what the tutor puts there
• Deep links into library resources are not
  possible or stable across time/space/users
• Different users, in different circumstances, may
  get a different appropriate copy
• A lot of useful material is being developed as
  courseware - but not managed by a library

28
Illustrating the problems

• A lecturer is constructing a Blackboard course
  module on the development of business in China
• assemble materials ideally those that can be
  used online by distance-learners
• construct a hybrid reading list that can be given
  to students to support their coursework
• Lecturer searches for business china using
• the RDN, to discover Internet resources
• ZETOC, to discover recent journal articles

29
(No Transcript)
30
(No Transcript)
31
(No Transcript)
32
(No Transcript)
33
(No Transcript)
34
Issues

• different user interfaces
• look-and-feel
• subject classification, metadata usage
• everything is HTML human-oriented
• difficult to merge results, e.g. combine into
  reading lists
• difficult to build a reading list to pass on to
  students
• difficult to move from discovering journal
  article to having copy in hand (or on desktop)
• users need to manually join services together

35
A user surviving (just)in an Information
Landscape!
Library OPAC
ZETOC
RDN
(etc)
Blackboard
36
The problems

• multi-portal problem
• how to provide seamless discovery across multiple
  content providers
• appropriate-copy problem
• how to provide access to the most appropriate
  copy of a resource (given access rights,
  preferences, cost, speed of delivery, etc.)
• password-proliferation problem
• how to streamline access-management so that user
  can be identified/authenticated once, and all
  authorisations (personal or institutional) to use
  resources recognised

37
A solution

• an information environment (!)
• framework of machine-oriented services allowing
  the end-user to
• discover, access, use, publish resources across a
  range of content providers
• move away from lots of stand-alone Web sites...
• ...towards more coherent whole
• remove need for user to interact with multiple
  content providers

38
JISC Information Environment
39
JISC Information Environment
40
Project ANGEL
authenticated networked guided environment for
learning
(other access protocols like Z39.50 also possible)
Any web portal via which the user can access
managed content
Any content resource from which items can be
retrieved by any protocol
sensible protocol
41
Information Environment functions

• discovery
• finding content across multiple providers
• access
• streamlining access to appropriate copy
• content provision
• exposing metadata about content for searching,
  harvesting, alerting
• fusion presentation services
• portals (subject portals, media-specific portals,
  geospatial portals, institutional portals, VLEs,
  )

42
Discovery

• technologies that allow providers to disclose
  metadata to portals
• searching - Z39.50 (Bath Profile)
• harvesting - OAI-PMH
• alerting - RDF Site Summary (RSS)
• fusion services may sit between provider and
  portal
• broker (searching)
• aggregator (harvesting and alerting)

43
Access

• in the case of books, journals, journal articles,
  end-user wants access to the most appropriate
  copy
• need to join up discovery services with
  access/delivery services (local library OPAC,
  ingentaJournals, Amazon, etc.)
• need localised view of available services
• discovery service constructs an OpenURL to pass
  metadata about the resource to an OpenURL
  resolver
• the OpenURL resolver provides pointers to the
  most appropriate copy of the resource, given
• user and library preferences, cost, access
  rights, location

44
Shared services

• collection/service description service
• information about collections (content) and
  services (protocol) that make that content
  available
• authentication and authorisation
• resolver services
• user preferences and institutional profiles
• terminology services
• metadata registries
• ...

45
Important technologies

• Z39.50 (Bath Profile), OAI, RSS are key
  discovery technologies...
• and by implication, XML and simple/unqualified
  Dublin Core
• portals provide discovery services across
  multiple content providers
• access to resources via OpenURL and resolvers
  where appropriate
• Z39.50 and OAI not mutually exclusive
• general need for all services to know what other
  services are available to them

46
Shared problems

• problems faced by end-users are shared across
  sectors and communities
• student looking for information from variety of
  bibliographic sources
• lecturer searching for e-learning resources from
  multiple repositories
• researcher working across multiple data-sets and
  associated research publications
• a.n.other looking to buy or sell a second-hand car

47
IMS Digital Repositories
48
JISC Information Environment
49
The difference between guided and open
learning resources

• guided resources (VLE)
• A (single) directed course through a series of
  items activities
• Most VLEs will impose some pedagogic model
• Described by purpose

• open resources (Library)
• Finding aids, but the user chooses the course
• No pedagogy assumed
• Described by content

pedagogy n. 1.The art or profession of
teaching. 2.Preparatory training or instruction.
French pédagogie, from Old French, from Greek
paidagogia, from paidagogos, slave who took
children to and from school.
50
Web Services
Web Services are self-contained,
self-describing, modular applications that can be
published, located and invoked across the
Web.IBM Web Services architecture overview

• small units of functionality
• informational
• transactional
• b2b (m2m)
• key technologies
• XML, HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI
• supporting organisations
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  http//www.w3.org/2002/ws/
• Web Services Interoperability Working Group
  (WS-I) http//www.ws-i.org/

51
WSDL, UDDI and SOAP

• Web Service Description Language
• XML descriptions of Web services
• note limited scope for describing content of
  collections
• Universal Discovery, Description and Integration
• technology for building distributed registry of
  Web services
• Simple Object Access Protocol
• remote procedure calls based on XML and HTTP

52
Bricks to build our architecture

• current - digital library technologies
• fairly well understood
• fairly slow moving
• Z39.50, OAI, OpenURL, ...
• future - Web service technologies
• largely driven by commercial portal sector and
  b2b requirements
• fast moving, new set of acronyms and terms
• UDDI, WSDL, SOAP,...
• semantic Web and RDF
• how do these fit in?

53
Predictions

• increased use of XML and SOAP as carrier
  technologies
• OAI - experimental implementation using SOAP
• ZiNG - SRW (Search/Retrieve Web service) (Z39.50
  using SOAP)
• use of WSDL to describe services
• probably supplemented by other standards to
  describe content of collections
• use of portlet technologies
• demise of monolithic portal applications
• small, reusable functional building blocks
• sharing of portlets between portals

54
Problems that Libraries still need to help solve

• Resolving the metadata differences between open
  library resources, and guided learning
  resources
• The appropriate-copy problem
• The password-proliferation problem
• Organising all this new material!(the
  scriptorium problem?)

55
Questions?