10 minute practical guide to the JISC Information Environment (for publishers!)

a centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk

10 minute practical guide to the JISC Information

Environment(for publishers!)

Andy PowellUKOLN, University of Bath

[email protected]

21 June 2002


What do you need to do?

• support machine oriented (m2m) interfaces to your content/services

• not contentious...– in line with ‘Web services’ approach

• not just about ‘portals’...– subject portal, reading list tool in

VLE, library ‘portal’ (e.g. Zportal or MetaLib), SFX service component, personal desktop reference manager


Allow searching…

• support distributed searching of your content by remote services

• offer Bath Profile compliant Z39.50 target

• use Z39.50 to expose simple Dublin Core metadata about your content

• note possible use of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) in the future


Allow harvesting…

• enable remote services to gather your metadata records

• offer Open Archives Initiative repository using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

• use OAI-PMH to expose simple DC metadata about your content

• ‘as well as’ OR ‘instead of’ offering Z39.50 target


Share news/alerts using RSS

• offer machine-readable news and alerting channel(s)

• news/alerts might include– service announcements– list(s) of new resources

• RSS = RDF Site Summary– simple XML application

• use RSS in addition to existing email alerting


Become an OpenURL source

• adopt ‘open’, ‘context-sensitive’ linking in the form of OpenURLs

• add OpenURLs into search results– e.g. SFX buttons next to each result

• support mechanism to associate preferred OpenURL resolver with each user– e.g. cookies or user-preferences

database


Become an OpenURL target

• allow links back into your services from OpenURL resolvers

• publicise your ‘link-to’ syntax, e.g.– ISSN-based URLs– DOI-based URLs

• support deep-linking direct to resources– direct to resource, OR– indirect via abstract page


Use persistent IDs

• Z39.50, OAI-PMH and RSS expose your metadata to other services

• allow deep-linking from metadata (e.g. search results) to resource

• deep-linking URLs should be unique and persistent– possibly based on DOIs

• why? allows long-term use of URLs, e.g. in course reading list


Authentication issues

• how do I control access?

• same as currently - using Athens (or your own system)– user challenged on entry to ‘portal’– portal can determine some ‘search’

access rights from Athens, but you may need to ‘trust’ portal

– ZBLSA portal/pub query mechanism– you retain final control at point of access


Branding vs. visibility

• will exposing metadata to external service lead to loss of branding?

• not really - expect external services to carry your branding as ‘quality stamp’– e.g. RSS channel carries your name,

URL and logo

• following URL in search results leads direct to your site– so more visibility rather than less


Final thought...

• not just about a one-way low of information - from ‘you’ to ‘us’

• also exposes content within the academic community

• for example...– RDN offers Z39.50 access to 50,000

resource descriptions (soon to offer SOAP interface)

– you can integrate this into your ‘portals’


Links to further information

• JISC Information Environment technical architecture

www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/

• JISC Information Environment and Web services

www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/information-environments/

10 minute practical guide to the JISC Information Environment (for publishers!)

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