Vision of Library Technical Services

Editor's Notes

1. Acknowledgement: Prof. Isael Moskowitz, Prof. Neil Litchman and others from NYU SCPS; Andrew Sankowsi, Cynthia Chambers, Theresa Maylone, and Dr. James Benson from St. John’s Univ. Libraries; I would also like to thank the Ad-Hoc Selection Committee, Robin Dale, Lai-Ying Hsuing, and Kate McGirr, and others at UCSC Libraries. UCSC Libraries are known for the innovation, ground-breaking interdisciplinary research, teamwork, and productivities. The UCSC Libraries adds 35,000 records to local III and Melvyle system catalogs each year. It works actively and collaboratively with nine other UC Libraries and the CDL to develop and manage shared collections and services available to all UC faculty and students. The brochure that I received from the mail already captured the changing landscape of library by the millennial a lot more vividly than I can possibly describe. I could not agree with it more that “in the digital age, the ability to send information, images, music and films through fiber optics at literally the speed of light – presents enormous opportunities as we seek to preserve knowledge and make it accessible for current and future generations.”
2. On April 16, 2009, Cliff Lynch gave a presentation to a group of librarians from METRO on Digital Dilemmas. In this presentation, he outlined strategic challenges and opportunities for libraries in the next 5 to 10 years. He said that future of the libraries could not be judged in isolation from the communities that libraries were serving. The library communities shall be viewed as a whole package – role of the university – tuition-based vs. land-grant based, proliferation of media, spread of technologies, and their impact on teaching and learning activities, scientific research, and scholarly communications. What we can deliver to meet the needs of 21st century user communities will great impact on libraries’ budget, and justification of our expenditures. The vision of the next generation of technical services has to be in alignment with the mission and goals of UCSC and its Libraries. LC Response to On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control by Deanna B. Marcum (2008): http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/LCWGResponse-Marcum-Final-061008.pdf
3. The vision of next generation of technical services shall be in alignment with the vision of UCSC University Libraries. According to the brochure, the vision for the UCSC Libraries can be summarized as the following: a) Library as a physical place that provides state-of-the-art facilities that include: a1) instant access to electronic library holdings and resources for scholars, students and the public; a2) advanced technology for digital preservation; a3) greater capacity for traditional print collections; a4) expanded facilities for Special Collections and Archives including a new preservation lab; b) Library as a virtual space for b1) millennial that grew up with the internet and computers, to use their preferred electronic publications to print ones, visuals over text, social learning over individualized experiences, social networking online over the physical traveling when meeting their peers; c) Library as living laboratories for converting art, music, and text from their original formats to digital ones, and then storing, providing and accessing to them; d) Library as the hub for the scholarly community and intellectual engagement, including the infrastructure for effective dissemination of ideas in the forum of talks, exhibits, and forums; e) Library as Archive – “Memory Canned,” backing up culture in the digital age; e1) selection and de-selection content to be included in the archive; e2) reinforcing rigorous academic standards; e3) ensuring the authoritative and authenticated recorded human knowledge to be passed on from generation to generation.
4. Opportunity for Academic Libraries: Buyers, Gateways, Archives, etc. Freely available contents provided by search engine services attracted library users. According to survey report done by Roger Schonfeld at Ithaka in 2006, the values of library functions can be summarized as: buyers (80%), gateways (55%), and archives (70%). The starting point for researchers, 50% of humanities would use library catalog, and 30% of economics and 48% of physics would use disciplinary groupings. Business process management (BPM) for Libraries: 3.1 Organization/knowledge society – Organizations compromise of four elements (people, processes, control mechanisms, and structure), which are powered by technologies, fueled by information and driven by knowledge; 3.2 People – Refers to roles and responsibilities, skills, training, motivation, capability, and job fit, judging by adaptability, cognitive skills, complexity, curiosity, creativity, risk taking, self-direction, high-order of thinking and sound reasoning, communication skills; 3.3. Processes – workflow and information flow, and control mechanisms to get the job done; 3.4 Domains – subject disciplines 3.5 Technologies / Tools – capable to analysis, comparison, inference, interpretation, evaluation, synthesis, and assessment; 3.6 Distribution / Tools - capable to select, collect, understand, interpret, use, act, create, access, locate, synthesis 3.7 Context – Transactional, promotional, and information 3.8 Culture – Globalization and localization
5. 21st century Enrollment – Characteristics of 21st Century students – According to an EDUCAUSE article published in 2005 by Ron Bleed of Maricopa Community Colleges, in the United States, the average teenager spends 22,000 hours watching televisions by the time he or she graduated from high school. The average vocabulary of the average 14-year-old dropped from 25,000 words in 1950 to only 10,000 words in 1999. By age 21, the average student will have spent 10,000 hours on video games; sent or received 200,000 e-mails, talked for 10,000 hours on a cell phone, but read for under 5,000 hours. Proliferation of media has impact the lives of the young people. Through TV, video games, and movies, children are visually stimulated and learn from the new media. Our brains are getting better at problem solving despite of declining in reading. He also quoted that the industrial age was built on physical labor, and information age is built on people’s left-brain capabilities in logic, analysis, literalness, and sequentiality. The upcoming concept age will use people’s right brain capabilities in creativity, empathy, pattern recognition, and seeing the big picture. New students, new technologies and new senses are the future. The viable education strategy is media education. Teaching and learning of 21st Century Skills – In his article, Ron also noticed that there was a new kind of digital divine today, and it is the divide between faculty and students. Faculty, stuck in yesterday’s analog world, are confronted with students who arrive nicely fluent in digital technology and virtuals of hyper speed. Libraries have to bridge the digital divine between students and faculty, and be active participants in the training of the new learners, new technologies, new workforce skills, and new modes of creative expression while at the same time, honoring the tradition. Librarians have to understand the group coherent of the students and faculty, and provide an infrastructure that would promote advanced thinking, decision making, and whatever calls for the teaching and learning of 21st-century skills. 21st-century skills – According to enGauge report on 21st century learners, academic achievement entails the followings: a) digital age literacy (e.g. basic, scientific, economic, statistical and technological literacy; visual and information literacy, and multicultural literacy and global awareness); b) Inventive thinking (e.g. adaptability, managing complexity and self-direction; curiosity, creativity, and risk taking; high-order thinking and sound reasoning); c) Effective communication (teaming, collaboration, and interpersonal skills); personal, social, and civic responsibility, interactive communication; d) High productivity (prioritizing, planning, and managing for results; effective use of real-world tools; and ability to produce relevant, high-quality products. 21st Century research – According to Cliff Lynch, 21st century research entails the cyber infrastructure for research in science, engineering, humanities and social sciences. In science, the infrastructure components of science is more important than the science itself. High performance of computing, high availability and accessibility of data, people, organizations, and instrumentation have great impact on e-Research. Scientists in small labs can rely on tools to work with colleagues around the world, and produce scientific results through re-useable data made available to them for scientific analysis. Humanities can also communicate in systematic way with their colleagues through collaboration and simulation using data from across disciplines. Librarians can form partnership with faculty to curate the data sets, and address their challenges in the following: 1) regulatory compliance requirements; b) data management, e.g. strategies, plans, lifecycle, etc.; c) information dissemination services.
6. The diagram depicts a snapshot of the information infrastructure for the University resources, especially in regard to faculty, and Libraries; FocusOn Search and CategoryMap sit on top of the information discovery layer, building the bridges, e.g. among faculty, university resources and libraries; Enable us to understand who the users are, and what processes involved in info creation and consumption especially in regard to faculty; More category types to markup faculty activities, university resources and the library? What are considered as input, what are considered as output? What are the processes to generate the output? How information flows between each process? This diagram details facts to collect and markup at contextual level.
7. This diagram indicates the flows of the systems. We aggregate contents through the aggregation of technologies, and distribute the contents to users. Librarians deploy systems, such as Collection Development, Cataloging, LibGuide, capable to select, organize, access, guide, enhance, and distribute contents to the user through technologies. Yet, there are still complaints …. Where is the user’s behavior context? – we index tons of info, present them to the user without any filtering, e.g. who are the users, and what are they looking for?
8. At document processing side, if we have a CategoryMap, it will: Lookup and consume vocabulary services provided by LC, NLM, OCLC, and Getty in manual and batch modes; Process vocabulary and enable the choice of the appropriate form of named entity in reference to terms clustered by applications, tagged by end-users, structured in classification scheme; Distribute the contents to the end-users through the analysis of existing collections, activities and users; Classify the users’ behavior context better?
9. There are objects to be embedded within the front end of FocusOn Search and CategoryMap. The objects being selected for insertion in a word document are: St. John’s Logo: Login/Create My Account; User preferences; Simple search and advanced search modes; Suggest; Reset; Email; Print; AskUs; Exit. The “Preview” button is expected to view full-text of ‘Search results selected’ when limiting to online only, etc. Refinement search results by subject, and then limit the subject to concept only. Click browse CategoryMap, relationship among highlighted subject terms about the person can be explored from OCLC Named Entities for the person.  St. John’s FocusOn Search As Google Gadget. ‘TextThis’ is the button to send a few and final result sets to mobile phone, mocked up from North Caroline State University’s Quick Search: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/ The button ‘Save’ means ‘Save To Bag’ for further processing. After ‘Save to Bag’, users have the choice of saving the items into ‘my library.’ The list of ‘Add Note’, ‘Edit labels’, ‘Write review’, and ‘Remove’ will appear in brief item listing display. Two selected books in users’ library are selected for such display, extracted and mocked up from Google Books.  The label ‘Add note’ applies to the entire banner of the 1st book in brief display. The label ‘Write review’ applies to the entire banner of 2nd book in brief display. User created labels will be indexed by CategoryMap. Two trails of bread crumbs for folder navigation are designed to integrate FocusOn Search with existing Websites of the University and Libraries. The top one sits right above the user actions for Print, Attach/RSS, Libraries, Text This, Reformat and Gadget. It indicates users’ paths, e.g. Home > Academics & School > Libraries > Resources > Focus On > About Henry George. Click on the trail will lead users go back to the next higher level of the folder structured trail. The second trail in the bottom of the page indicates available services provided by the University, including feedback, privacy, safety, sitemap, and copyright information, etc. Click on the trail will lead users into the services provided by the University and the Libraries.
10. Centralized catalog: 1. Is part of the common service of the discovery layer, sitting on top of existing university information resources and Libraries on the Web, ILS (Integrated Library Systems), university resource planning systems (enterprise legacy systems), teaching and learning systems, and discipline-specific research repositories at institutional and regional level once the systems implemented in full-scale; 2. Provides interfaces for human-machine and machine-machine communication, interaction, collaboration, problem solving, and decision support; 3. Provides an inventory of structured data (xml, RSS, atom) and unstructured data (email, web page, .doc, .pdf, .excel) via a set of meta-data records. A meta-data record conformed to the institutional and industry standards describe the of-ness and about-ness of an information object and provide links to the object. Media Type: All media types in the catalog will be given descriptive meta-data for media type identification, discovery, search and retrieval, and linkage. 1. Like the rest of the collections in the catalog, they are classified for role-based access, arranged alphabetically for browsing, categorized for discovery, filtered, ETL and indexed for search and retrieval, recommended for reputation, top-ranked for analysis and other processes in the pipeline, and linked for obtaining the media object locally or mashing up with external applications remotely via public available APIs on top of HTTP and enterprise service bus within the private cloud computing environment.   2. The administrative and structural metadata for the maintenance and manipulation of each media type (e.g. reformatting images, videos, and audios) as a media object is beyond the scope of this project at the moment. NAMED ENTITIES The named entity for a person, family, and corporate is considered as an information object that comes with the following attributes when appropriate: Zip-code, address, country; Area code, phone number, device profiles, etc.; Web page and email in the form of URI; Language; Timeline that is specific to a named entity. For a person, timeline refers to dates associated with the person’s birth date, death date, and period of activity in Gregorian calendar; Category appropriate to the level of granularity of the information object, e.g. skills and specialty for a person, and correlated with: subject terms clustered by an application; controlled vocabulary such as LCSH and MESH provided by a lookup; user-tagged terms; classification scheme such as LC classification and Dewey; Association related to the about-ness of a named entity. For a person, the associated attributes are not limited to the followings, e.g. title, gender, affiliation, field of activity, occupation and biographical information. At runtime, a search of the named entity of a person, all resources, works, expressions, manifestations and items about the named entity will be retrieved and displayed along with the bio info of the person; Association related to the of-ness of a named entity. At runtime, a search of the named entity of a person, all works, expressions, manifestations, and items created by the named entity will be retrieved and displayed based on content model for rendering; Relationships between named entities for persons, families, and corporate bodies are tagged, mapped, grouped, and visualized according to user-tagged terms, association rules, classification, and user profiles specified in web form during initial registration. A user can also modify such relationship manually. The backend systems will recommend additional relationships by running a recommendation engine on behalf of the user; Top-ranked for other processes in the pipeline, e.g. supporting collection development decision, users and collection performance analysis, e.g. query expansion; Like media type, the specific named entity, e.g. person, will be linked and mashed up for obtaining the aboutness and of-ness of a person, locally and remotely via public available APIs on top of HTTP and ESBs within the private cloud computing network; Privacy, copyright, and information security, including opt-in and opt-out option for the named entities to be exposed and shared across the enterprise; The output of the focused page can also be rendered for import and export, RSS, preview, citation list generation, sharing, printing, email and texting in user-defined formats and devices. Other entities such as concept term, object name, event name, and geographic name will carry similar system functionality and capability as the named entities for persons, families, and corporate bodies. At run-time, given a concept term, for instance, works, expression, manifestations, and items related to the concept term will be retrieved and displayed regardless of its structure, media type, format, repository, etc. according to the classification of the documents, controlled vocabulary, role-based access, and content models for rendering. At run-time, the relationship between the concept term, for instance, and its broader terms, narrower terms, used terms, etc. can be exposed and consumed by other applications, which might take it as an input for making choices and validation of the form of a name or subject, assigning classification and subject terms to the resources, in addition to the development and maintenance of the vocabulary for categories. The search facility in FocusOn Search will suggest spelling correction based on patterns, rules, keywords, phonics, synonyms, dictionary, and controlled vocabulary within one dialogue box in a single interface. It will also suggest categories that would facilitate discovery based on statistical analysis of queries, documents, user profiles and activities, usage, and vocabulary services consumed from other vocabulary service providers. For geographic name, if applicable, zip code and area code processing will be a part of the application. Ideally, Google Map API look up should be supported as well if applicable.
11. Fine-grained taxonomy management is important for not only for subject searches, but also for mission critical operations at the University and Libraries. For Libraries, e.g. it is important to make informed decisions as what we are doing and how well we are doing through baselining and reporting on user services, collection management, circulation, acquisitions, cataloging, etc. The CategoryMap application and along with its program will link these processes across the units of the Libraries, and the University.   Therefore, it is our job to maintain such taxonomy for the reuse and sharing of enterprise-wide information resources among ERP systems, ILS, institutional repositories, etc. in conformance to institution and industry standards. The CategoryMap will serve as the backbone of an enterprise’s common data services, in addition to the time of the day and locations.   The CategoryMap will manage category terms which can be in a form of concept, object, event and place, harmonized from subject terms:   Clustered by an application; Looked up through controlled vocabulary such as LCSH, MESH, and AAT; Tagged by user-defined terms; Structured by LC and Dewey classification; Referenced directly from fund expenditure structure in acquisitions; Analyzed based on usage statistics reports aggregated from circulation, content suppliers, etc., and no. of documents/objects likely carrying the category term; Managed in a knowledge base for vocabulary filtering, mapping, ETL, etc., and in a data warehouse for data mining; The search facility will also handle query processing in relational database management systems and ontological database management systems; Relationships between concepts, objects, events, and geographic names are constructed according to controlled vocabularies developed by LC, NLM, and Getty. All named entities such as personal name (PN), family name (FN), corporate name (CN), concept term (CT), object name (ON), event name (EN), geographic name (GN), and timeline (TN) in a meta-data record will have their own authority records stored and maintained centrally in a logical/physical name resolver facility distributed globally by authorized vocabulary service providers such as LC, OCLC, British Library, and National Library of Canada on the Web. Named headings in the authority records at the name resolver facility such as OCLC WorldCat are:   Constructed in conformance to tagging standards and rules; Contributed by a community of users who have defined their roles and responsibilities in service contribution and consumption, registered and exposed their services with major vocabulary service providers; Validated by templates, encoding levels, schemas, name authority files, controlled vocabularies, reference tools, and business rules; Governed for the enforcement of policies, service level agreements (SLAs), operational level agreements (OLAs), service reconciliation, service lifecycle management, compliance, SSO (Single Sign On), etc.; Monitored, measured and reported for information quality, fiduciary, and security.   The CategoryMap application will perform dynamic lookup or batch processing for named entities and subjects in a name resolver facility via Web-services for service consumption. User-tagged terms in such a manner will be reviewed, card-sorted, and integrated into a master list of commonly used vocabulary before they are contributed to the vocabulary service providers when appropriate. The application will map a user-tagged term for the object into its variant name, preferred form of name, and default form of name as appropriate to the user’s choice according to statistical processing and tag-based ranking algorithms, and others. See references for information criteria defined by COBIT Conceptual Framework, and ISACA Model Curriculum.
12. There are two tiers: 1) Cloud tier – user processes on the internet (OS for Browser); 2) Vocabulary tier – document processes on the intranet (OS for Windows); Sync desktop application from both tiers;
13. Reference: ER Diagram for RDA Taxonomy: High-Level Relationship Among Entities by IMT (Information Management Team) 1. Uncontrolled access point, explanatory heading, etc. excluded from the diagram
14. This ER Diagram indicates entity relationship among named entities and subjects (e.g. concept, object, event, place). Reference: ER Diagram for RDA Taxonomy: High-Level Relationship Among Entities by IMT (Information Management Team) (4 of 8)
15. DFD (Data Flow Diagram) Context Level for FocusOnSearch
16. System Flow Chart for FocusOn Search and CategoryMap Info Sharing Processes for Enterprise Wide Information Discovery
17. The CategoryMap has to leverage the vocabulary framework such as Topic Map as formal taxonomy building block, which sits on top of commonly defined thesauri such as LC LCSH, NLM MESH, and Getty AAT, and in addition, it presents the topic map and other vocabulary processing features for FocusOn Search in the discovery layer. On the one hand, we will leverage existing vocabulary framework such as OCLC WorldCat Identities by developing service consumption applications, and on the other hand, we have to actively collaborate with others in developing the common vocabulary infrastructure for the Web.
18. 1. Info Sharing Processes for Enterprise Wide Information Discovery 2. Maintain, Trace, Track, Analyze, Report
19. Continue to collect sample unstructured source data at St. John’s Univ. Web Site from the faculty page of Tobin College of Business like Dr. Charles Wankel, and integrate the page using CategoryMap application that is going to integrate into the Discovery Layer for FocusOn Search. Continue to collect sample unstructured source data composed by a group of librarians as the libraries’ guides to the events of current and future interest, and published at St. John’s University Web site like one of the Topic Guides Titled “Focus on Henry George”. Continue to collect sample unstructured source data from OCLC WorldCat Identities Services for Named Entities Resolution using LCCN number as identifier to locate the personal name page for Dr. Charles Wankle. Continue to collect sample structured data to be syndicated from Google Books by FocusOn Search using Henry George’s “Dreamer or Realist” as use cases for developing detailed display of an selected item in the Front End of FocusOn Search To syndicate data feed from the university resources and Libraries on the Web, ‘Attach’ button would allow the system to obtain HTML pages and their associated files (e.g. PDF, Excel, Word, etc.) from sites recommended by the discovery layer of the FocusOn Search. The file filtering layer prebuilt within the FocusOn Search will automatically convert the native pages into format-independent files, ready to be reviewed, ETL (Extracted, Transformed, and Loaded), and integrated with the repositories of FocusOn Search. A plug-in meta-data conversion utility will capture the attached metadata and convert them into a centralized meta-data repository for the entire discovery layer, ready to be reused by other applications. The ‘RSS’ button is going to store dynamic contents on the web. Special change management strategies, packages, and techniques have been evaluated, e.g. Rational Asset Manger, for SOA services, etc. Reformat’ is an export facility that presents users with choices for output options of further processing, e.g. RefWork. All the cataloged resources are expected to have zip code lookup function, and would be interfaced with Google Map, and localized as how the systems behaved in OCLC Open WorldCat http://www.worldcat.org/. Such visualized features are expected to be performed after final refinement. Two sample result sets indicate that the discovery layer of the FocusOn Search will send open API requests to a list of service providers, dynamically determining the appropriate copy to present if there are multiple choices, the appropriate format template to use for rendering based on criteria of the followings: a) predefined by the users, b) pre-processed open URL links according to known contracts, service level agreement and trust management, c) patterns, heuristic rules, statistical analysis, and data mining of resources, users, activities, etc. in the data warehouse and the knowledge-based of the discovery layer.