AARL

Conference reports

VALA 2004 - Breaking boundaries: integration and interoperability

12th Biennial Conference and Exhibition of the Victorian Association for Library Automation 3-5 February 2004 at the Melbourne Convention Centre

A bluffer's guide

VALA 2004 included six plenary sessions and 42 concurrent sessions. With more than 720 delegates, the Melbourne Convention Centre was alive with library speak for at least a few days. The conference theme of Breaking Boundaries was chosen by VALA to reflect both the enormous successes and the key challenges in the field of library and information technology. The keynote speakers, drawn from the USA, France and China, were selected for their expertise and work with strategic projects of global interest. I found them to be mostly relevant, at least to a range of challenges directly facing us at the Australian War Memorial: developing digital archives; archiving of websites; the new role(s) of libraries in a networked online environment; and (technological) innovation itself.

Hal Abelson from Massachusetts Institute of Technology had the responsibility of kicking off the conference and setting the mood in his plenary session on Universities, the Internet and the Intellectual Commons. Abelson spoke about MIT's role in changing the scholarly communications model, essentially through giving free and open access to high-quality scholarly material through their OpenCourseWare site http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html. This initiative attempts to give an overview of all courses at MIT at a basic level, mostly via notes, assignments and solutions in pdf format. They wanted breadth and they wanted it to be sustainable. DSpace, an open source institutional repository, provides the backend to OpenCourseWare on the web. He also spoke in some detail about the rights crisis and the barriers that it places on scholarly communications. They see the establishment of an institutional repository (IR) as one of many steps in reducing the monopoly ownership of scholarship by commercial publishers. MIT uses Creative Commons licenses in the open access environment (see http://creativecommons.org/). He said that MIT just wants a seat at the table when new modes of scholarly publication are established and negotiated.

Following Abelson was McKenzie Smith, also from MIT, where she is the associate director for Technology at the MIT Libraries and the project director for DSpace. Her paper is now online at http://www.vala.org.au/vala2004/2004pdfs/69Smith.PDF She talked to us about why we have (digital) repositories, what they are and gave some details about the DSpace concept. She said our current systems (scholarship, instruction, publishing and communication) are in transition and becoming increasingly networked and digital. How can libraries respond? Our clients are using new systems and formats, but many responsibilities are not yet defined. She said that a new healthy system must work for all stakeholders - authors, editors, publishers, different disciplines and users. We need to provide institutional repositories for assets like articles, e-theses, images, audio-visual material, papers, datasets, databases, learning objects, and digitised library collections because it is our curatorial responsibility. In this digital era it becomes the first step in improving institutional management, enriching scholarly communications and is in the interests of general information management. It also helps with: rebalancing knowledge sharing, enhancement of knowledge environs, improving your reputation (as a library), preservation obligations, protection of research, etc. DSpace is open and interoperable and based on standards, providing capture, description (using Persistent Identifiers), distribution (Google indexes it), management and the facilitation of preservation. It is still at an early stage of development and they are still planning, versioning and looking at providing more XML support and other features over time. In its broader application, MIT wants to be only one of many stakeholders in the DSpace Federation, building a gift economy around open source architecture. She said MIT saw the datagrid concept of networked repositories and computing resources as the way to go. As many of us are now looking at digital asset or object repositories, this talk really made one think about this as an alternative to the expensive commercially provided systems that have probably not been designed with the same motives as this project.

A former colleague of mine who is now at ANU (Michele Huston) gave her speaker's award to Herbert Van de Sompel from Los Alamos National Laboratory. I agree that he was terrific, but she did not get to hear Lorcan Dempsey (who gave the last plenary session) and I suspect that her more technical background allowed her to understand and appreciate Van de Sompel's talk a lot more then I did. He is the man behind the OpenURL framework and the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol (OAI-PMH) that provides a standards framework for persistent identifiers. As a Dutchman he was very keen to point out that the concept of hypertext linking and a network of human knowledge was first theorised by another Dutchman, Paul Otlet, in the early 1900s. 'Everything is linked!' He also spoke of the serials crisis (they are too expensive) and the permissions crisis (favouring the individual and publisher, not the collective). All his own publications are in open access journals. He had much praise for MIT's DSpace project as one step in the process of facilitating change but stressed that standards defining interoperability between repositories would be critically important. This was, however, a very frustrating issue - he has been unable to obtain endorsement of his OpenURL framework as a standard. Money to fund interoperability standards projects was either too little or disappearing altogether (eg the CIMI project to encourage open, standards-based approaches to creating and sharing digital information in museums folded because of a lack of funding last year http://www.cimi.org/about.html). He stressed that it was time for a new model for scholarly communications and that universities needed to agitate for a seat at the table when the negotiations started with the commercial companies who are also evolving and adapting to new demands. He also spoke of Creative Commons as a better rights framework for the 'gift/exchange' system of scholarly communications. As he raced through the last part of his presentation I think I caught the gist of what he said regarding the way forward: libraries must continue to try to add value as content nodes via a network of federated repositories, get out of redundant services, specialise and get into distributed collaboration (eg SETI Institute, OAI-PMH, the QuestionPoint cooperative virtual reference model, and the LOCKSS tool for low-cost persistent digital 'caches' of http-delivered content) - not everyone has to do everything!

The fourth plenary session was given by Dr Wu Jianzhong, director of the Shanghai Library and the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai, China. Fortunately, his paper, Developing a borderless hybrid library: Shanghai experience is online at http://www.vala.org.au/vala2004/2004pdfs/71Wu.PDF as I was unable to attend this session.

Catherine Lupovici is head of the Digital Library Department, Direction des Services et des Résaux, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNdF) and gave her plenary session on Archiving the web: impact on librarianship. I was interested in this paper because the War Memorial has recently become a partner in the NLA Pandora project to collect Australian online publications. Whilst the French program has many similarities to Pandora, it is also concerned with harvesting from the deep web (online content which is restricted from robots - technically locked away). She said that links are also part of the web content - with semantic meaning, not as intelligent as XML would be but still providing context and meaning. BNdF is convenor of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) with 11 national libraries including: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US. They have an agreed framework for research on tools development, metrics, testing, the deep web, content management, access tools, and smart crawler development. The tools developed are to be Open Source and all source code is to be available on the IIPC website - http://www.netpreserve.org. Interestingly, NLA leads the IIPC Deep Web Archiving Group. Lupovici was yet another presenter who expressed the following recurring concerns: the need for persistent identifiers; the end of manual cataloguing (because there is too much content) and the resulting need for agreed standards if automatons will be able to harvest and build indexes; and that commercial companies don't have a vested interest in the preservation of electronic publications when they no longer attract buyers, so it is all up to us.

The final and perhaps most entertaining plenary was given by Lorcan Dempsey, vice-president, Office of Research, at the Online Computer Library Centre (http://www.oclc.org). He spoke on Library: Service, Space, Collection. He started by reminding us about the nature of the traditional library and reading room, its physical space and the evidence left in that space by those who have gone before us. Libraries are well regarded, trusted and known institutions, but we are experiencing a move towards a network space where we will need to think about things quite differently: how we learn; how we interact with each other; ownership of collections; how we present the special, etc. He noted that (digital) repositories are emerging alongside the classical publishing environment and asked us how we create valued services in this new environment. Libraries are there to support research and learning and if our clients behave differently we have to react to the new behaviours and anticipate new needs or risk becoming irrelevant. We need to re-invent our physical space and the services we provide to match new needs in an online networked environment. His presentation was both content rich and entertaining, but may have been too much for tired minds to take in at the very end of the three days. It was unfortunate that this presentation, which contained many thought provoking challenges and quite complex concepts, was not eventually made available online for deeper contemplation. Some of those challenges for the new online networked library environment that struck me as relevant for our future included: creation of new collections; life cycle management (including print collections); keeping our collections alive through the provision of richer services; facilitating resource discovery, access and disclosure (to Google); the acquisition of born digital material; management of fragmented collections; mainstreaming special collections; encouraging an archival perspective on provenance and preservation, providing context and meaning to digital resources; facilitating collaboration, virtual reference, digital repositories and portals; and re-engaging with new methods of learning and research. (Needless to say, in order to tackle many of these tasks, we must also make the even harder decisions about what we are currently doing and no longer need to do.)

As you can see, my report focuses on the plenary sessions, because VALA provided us with an almost complete set of the remaining conference papers in our registration pack. These papers are now all online at http://www.vala.org.au/vala2004/2004pprs/prgm2004.htm. I for one think that is a pretty amazing achievement (but quite an appropriate thing to do in our line of work). I would like to make a few more quick observations but with the individual sessions, I was only able to attend one of three streams daily and sometimes chose unwisely. Firstly, I must say how disappointing it is to know you have a full copy of a paper in your bag already and then turn up to the session only to hear someone read it out, word for word. If that's all there is, we could all stay at home and just email each other. There has to be more to conference attendance than this. Sure, there is the exhibition and the chance to network with colleagues but I believe those individual sessions are the presenter's chance to give us something else, something more, some inspiration and maybe some observations and even some passion or humour about their work or their project that they are not comfortable writing down or putting into Power Point. End of sermon. So what did I like or find stimulating, innovative or inspiring? Just a few highlights, mind the step...

Cathrine Harboe-Ree, Michele Sabto and Andrew Treloar from Monash University Library gave a paper on The library as digitorium: new modes of information creation, distribution and access (see http://www.vala.org.au/vala2004/2004pdfs/21HrSaTr.PDF). This was all about Monash University's efforts to develop digital services to support more effective and creative learning and teaching. They use 'digitorium' to describe their recent initiatives to support research, and transform scholarly communication. Monash University is the lead member of the Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) consortium, which includes University of New South Wales (UNSW), Swinburne University of Technology and the NLA. ARROW has been funded by the Australian government under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education. The ARROW project will identify and test a solution to support best-practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing.

I then raced upstairs to catch the remainder of the talk by Lloyd Sokvitne, from the State Library of Tasmania, on The Stable Tasmanian Open Repository Service (STORS) - the development and implementation of a multi-function open archive service for Tasmanian electronic documents (see http://www.vala.org.au/vala2004/2004pdfs/12Sokvit.PDF). I found this to be a fascinating review of an initiative that I had missed completely: STORS allows both government and non-government publishers in Tasmania to contribute electronic publications and documents to a central repository where they are both immediately accessible and maintained for posterity. It also provides a persistent URL for each document as well as ongoing file conversion, a file checksum (to verify authenticity or legitimacy), and links reflecting document versions or relationships. Perhaps it isn't perfect (yet), but it's mighty impressive to have this up and running in well under a year.

My next pick was Howard Quenault, from the Public Record Office Victoria on VERS: building a digital record heritage (see http://www.vala.org.au/vala2004/2004pdfs/13Quena.PDF). I guess that at least in part what impressed me about VERS (& STORS) was the whole 'Let's start immediately' attitude. Rather than waiting for someone to develop the perfect 'final' solution (and do we ever get these anyway?), the VERS strategy has been to undertake both research and practical projects, learning along the way. What became clear to the VERS project team was that if we do nothing, it will be very difficult to recover digital records created today in as little as ten years' time. Building on this was their 'Think Big, Start Small and Scale Quickly' philosophy. The PROV people also realised that whilst VERS is a good idea, staff in other organisations do not want additional tasks, and they want automated business processes. In implementing VERS therefore, one first determines how to source as much of the record from the digital environment as automatically as possible (using workflows, standard IT infrastructure information, consistent classifications etc). Quenault also mentioned that it is prudent also to retain the original 'born-digital' format of records as we do not yet know for sure which formats will survive.

There was an excellent round up of free or open source (F/OS) software concepts, benefits and issues by Brenda Chawner, senior lecturer, School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) (see http://www.vala.org.au/vala2004/2004pdfs/33Chawn.PDF). Chawner discussed some example F/OS projects in the library and information management field and then talked about some of the factors associated with their successful adoption including the match with an organisation's culture, technical infrastructure, staff skills, software functionality, and the extent of community support available.

If you are interested in any of the issues outlined briefly above, I recommend the online papers to you.

Mal Booth
Australian War Memorial

Strictly broadband: Broadband and the humanities, social sciences and creative arts

National Scholarly Communications Forum Roundtable held at Museum Victoria, 31 October 2003.

The impact of technology continued to be the primary theme of this latest seminar from the National Scholarly Communications Forum when it met on a cold, wet, October day in Melbourne to discuss the role of increasingly powerful and magnificent communications and IT infrastructure on the work of the humanities, social sciences and creative arts.

The meeting was chaired by Professor Malcolm Gillies, deputy vice-chancellor (Education) at The Australian National University, whose opening remarks referred to the importance of advanced technologies to the newly emerging creative class.

Most of the morning was taken up with discussion of technical matters. Dr Mike Sargent, chair of the Australian Research and Education Network Advisory Committee (AREN) talked about the need for information infrastructure to be integrated on a national basis to help Australia overcome the ongoing problem of distance. He mentioned, for example, that to transfer data from Siding Springs to Canberra at present means a physical car journey. Future network capacity will be greater, providing broadband, advanced computing facilities and the capacity to store and manipulate large amounts of data. Improved technology will provide better communications, but will have to be accompanied by better information management which will be fundamental to effective usage. Institutions will have to provide adequate access to the new networks, which will 'spill gigabytes on the front doorstep' but not deliver them to your office or laboratory. The information management issues are many: authentication, privacy, preservation, storage, tracking, rights management, workflows, and more.

Dr Sargent was followed by representatives from AARNet, GrangeNet and CeNTIE all of whom spoke with enthusiasm about the potential for increased collaboration and improved communication while pointing out that networks are only a tool and that it will be up to researchers to bring their own network dreams to reality. Some examples of new uses were discussed: instrumental master classes conducted across the Australian continent (musicians are very demanding clients, we learnt), the training of athletes at a distance through video linkages, critical care services provided by specialists located at a distance and elaborate haptic simulations which allow the training of surgeons. 'Haptic' was a new word to me, but it relates to touch, so haptic simulations are those which enable a student to feel what is going on rather than experiencing through other senses.

The afternoon was taken up with demonstrations of applications, two of which were in the humanities. Dr Jane Hunter is a senior research fellow at the Distributed Systems Technology CRC at the University of Queensland and project leader of the MAENAD (Multimedia Access for Enterprises across Networks and Domains) Project. Her interesting discussion outlined some of the more complex aspects of knowledge management and the need for new metadata standards which encompass both objective and subjective metadata. Objective metadata we are already familiar with in describing a film or other work. Subjective metadata refers to the recording of the values or judgements which people might make about that film (Bob likes it, Penny doesn't like it).

Dr Linda Barwick is based at the University of Sydney and is involved in the Pacific and Regional Archive of Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, a collaborative project begun in 2003 to establish a facility for digital preservation and access to audio recordings of endangered languages and musics from the Asia-Pacific region. Here technological issues are well entwined with the non-technological, the primary one being the public policy issue of responsibility for this virtual archive of older materials. Pacific governments are too poor to take responsibility for their own cultural heritage and no-one in Australia is willing to take on the long-term task of preservation and management of it all. Another major issue in this area is rights managements and the gap between what is legally and technologically possible. Not to mention the issues of cost and technical expertise which can be especially problematic in the humanities where research grants are small and where computer skills may not be readily available.

The day's proceedings were ably summed up and pondered upon by Richard Aedy, broadcaster, journalist and presenter of The Buzz on ABC Radio. Aedy was keen to take up the human implications of the day's discussion, commenting that while technology was increasingly effective, it has not yet removed the need for direct human interaction: why, for example, was this seminar being held in a real time and place rather than in cyberspace, and why Monash University's introduction of a 'virtual coffee room' had been a complete failure. He described himself as a techno-optimist, but having concerns about the human elements of technology. We are, after all, mammals and social beings able to pick up non-verbal and non-visual information and reliant on trust in our dealings with others.

There was no mention of libraries throughout the day, and their changing role in this new environment. However the implications for library managers are clear. The kinds of skills which librarians have are needed here, for managing and describing information, for helping in the storage and retrieval of data, and for creating information in accessible forms. Some of these are traditional skills, some need to be reconceptualised to accommodate the technological environment, all need to be seen in the context of new requirements and partnerships.

Margaret Henty
Australian National University