Abstract
With trends in collection development moving toward digital, streaming resources, and acquiring sets of materials, the Higher Education Library Information Network (HELIN) Consortium pulled together cataloging, acquisitions, and licensing information through a discovery platform. The discovery layer, in this case Innovative Interface's Encore, harvests disparate collections and enables the library user to easily refine her search through facets. Rice Sanders described the HELIN Consortium's Encore implementation and experiences, while McQuillan highlighted the West Bloomfield Township Public Library use of the Encore platform and other products.
Martha Rice Sanders opened the session with background information. The Higher Education Library Information Network (HELIN) Consortium is a mixed consortium. Ten academic libraries, ranging from the Community Colleges of Rhode Island to the University of Rhode Island, fourteen specialized libraries including all of the non-profit hospitals in the state and the state law library make up the consortium, sharing an integrated library system and pursuing other joint ventures. Regional concerns add to the group's complexity: most of the libraries are in Rhode Island, but two members are located elsewhere, one in Massachusetts and the other in the District of Columbia. Recently, the HELIN Consortium celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. The directors of the ten academic libraries sit on the Board of Directors for the consortium, setting a strategic agenda for the Executive Director. The central office employs three full-time librarians and one half-time librarian. Task forces, committees and affinity groups meet between three and six times a year to make decisions and try to find solutions that will make most librarians happy, rather than the lowest common agreement. Some of the strategic directions on the consortium's agenda this past year included cooperative purchasing and licensing of electronic content, centralizing technical services in the central consortium's office, identifying professional development opportunities, evaluating the current integrated library system, and pursuing a single-box search solution for discovery. The diversity of libraries that make up the HELIN Consortium directly informs the consortium's approach to their Encore interface discovery layer.
Changes in collection development partly drive HELIN's evolution. The changes in acquiring and cataloging practices from one-by-one to sets of electronic content alter the approaches to processing and discovering these resources. The trend to buy packages or groups of titles began with electronic journals, and now the trend is moving into e-books and other types of digital media. Now, the most recent interest is in obtaining streaming content. HELIN has been accessing databases of music materials from places like Alexander Street Press for a while, and while setting up trials and invoicing members for their purchased content, Rice Sanders found several of the member libraries purchased all of the available video databases, indicating a new direction for collecting content.
Innovative Interfaces provides HELIN's integrated library system (ILS). They use Encore as their interface, but some member libraries prefer to use the traditional interface and the consortium allows their members flexibility in their public face. The HELIN consortium was one of three or four consortia purchases of Innovative Interfaces' electronic resources management (ERM) system. Fourteen libraries are set up and many more are looking to utilize the system in the near future. In terms of repository software for locally created resources, the members have eight instances of digital commons through the Berkeley Electronic Press (Bepress): seven for individual libraries and one for the HELIN Consortium itself. One library subscribes to Innovative Interfaces’ repository software, Content Pro, and another one uses DSpace.
For the last fifteen years, the consortium has cataloged traditional and electronic materials. They began with original cataloging for e-journals from some of the larger, more stable packages and continued the practice with databases and e-books. The group decided early on that members would use separate records for print and electronic materials when they could. When the Cooperative Cataloging Serials Program (CONSER) of the Library of Congress made the aggregator-neutral cataloging decision in 2003, this upheld the process already embraced by the HELIN Libraries. Different holdings and the confusing display to patrons drove the decision-making in this case, so that if Library A had the paper version of the journal and Library B only had the electronic, it would be clear to the patrons of either Library A or B which they could access. When the academic partners subscribed to Serials Solutions in 2004, having separate records facilitated the development of new workflows and allowed for standardization of practice across the member libraries. Everybody has an A–Z list and the coverage database, and all but one library uses the link resolver. Each month, a de-duplicated set of bibliographic records for the electronic journals is loaded into the system, which allows for a more efficient workflow and more regulation of potential duplicate records in the catalog. While the option exists for e-books, the consortium has not yet implemented loading bibliographic records for e-books from Serials Solutions as it has with journals. They do receive bibliographic records from providers for packages, but they also have a guideline that if a package has fewer than one hundred titles and no records come with the package, the library has to catalog them individually with their utility. By centralizing the process to load the bibliographic records through the HELIN office, Rice Sanders can work with the vendors to ensure minimum standards set by the consortium.
This greater integration of resources results in more information for the public to sift through as users search the catalog. Many of their patrons approach the catalog without having an understanding that the catalog intermingles electronic and print materials, and many of the member libraries have their electronic resources on separate Web pages, which increases the number of paths to find the same information. By utilizing a one-box search tool, patrons can use the robust tool to narrow their searches. The consortium has also purchased and licensed products such as e-book sets (e.g., EEBO, ECCO, and the American Council of Learned Societies Collection), and streaming media from Alexander Street Press and Films on Demand. Some of the member libraries have been looking at datasets.
Bob McQuillan provided an overview of the discovery layer platform. One of the objectives of the presentation was to demystify the tools used to combine digital media and digital collections, such as e-books and streaming video, into the more traditional materials represented by the catalog. Although many vendors have such a discovery tool, the example given today was Encore, from Innovative Interfaces. To integrate the new tool with the decisions already made by the HELIN Consortium members, the new tool needed to be fairly agnostic about working with third party metadata services. The third party metadata, such as bibliographic records and coverage information from Serials Solutions, worked well with the highly integrated cataloging, acquisitions and ERM already in place, allowing for greater analysis of cost, coverage and use of the purchased materials. Encore provided a unified search and discovery tool across many different pieces, combining elements from the ERM, the catalog and the acquisitions information.
The goal for Encore is to expose digital content in every search. One of the main topics of the presentation is to harvest digital collections and push them to the forefront of a user's results set. This discovery layer promotes the range of resources the library holds to all of its users. The harvesting process relies on standards, such as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH). Harvesting is done in advance of the search, which provides the advantage of indexing the library's content locally in its system. This also gives the library an opportunity to normalize and minimize duplication. With a discovery platform, users may search against the entire collection, whether the underlying records are machine-readable cataloging (MARC) or XML-based, such as Dublin Core or Encoded Archival Description (EAD). With this kind of discovery platform users do not have to consider searching for formats or to which resources they have access. The search technology integrates cataloging and harvested resources into a single results set, where facets allow patrons to drill down into a more refined results set.
A feature of the platform allows participation from the user community. Community tagging is a kind of untapped methodology for describing local collections. It allows libraries to use their user base to add tags to the harvested resources and to already cataloged resources. The Library of Congress demonstrated the process in a project using Flickr. Users added 20,000 tags to the Library of Congress resources. While community tagging seems to be more popular at public libraries than academic libraries, this trend is beginning to shift. An example of community tagging from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln can be seen in their record describing an electronic rodent repellent device. With input from the students about tags, the favorite was “rat zapper.” Community tagging opens the door to a new range of possibilities for exposing partially described content in an increasingly usable way.
The products also aid in the creation and access of the digital repository. Content Pro is a storage and access platform, while Encore acts as a discovery layer on top of the digital repository. It is ideal to store maps, photos, documents, and audio and visual materials. An example of Content Pro comes from the Scottsdale Public Library. If users hover over the collections on the page, they can see the contents of each collection. The harvesting piece of Encore integrates the records for these collections with records for more traditionally found materials in the user's search results.
The HELIN Consortium bought the Encore platform as a package deal with their ERM. They have used Encore for a while and the single search box has become familiar to patrons. With the harvested content, patrons can access the materials either through the native sites or they can find it all in one place. Facets allow patrons to hone in on certain aspects of their search, such as finding results that include “Newport, Rhode Island” as a search term, limiting location to Salve Regina, and looking for print published in 2010 and only in English. In seconds users can drill down to that level. In addition to the faceted searching, Encore also provides contextual linking and community tagging. With the change in platform look, or “skins” just prior to the presentation, some of the terminology for the tag cloud had changed. The consortium's task forces and committees had not yet met to discuss and agree upon changes. These additional tags are populated by subject headings enabling patrons to narrow the search results.
In Encore, icons give a visual clue to patrons for material types. These icons not only provide a format indication for the user, but also act as a facet to drill down the search. The material types are in MARC format, acquired from whichever utility the member library uses. Similar to the recent change in terminology with the community tagging, the material type requires additional refining by the consortium members when describing electronic content. Currently, HELIN's Encore describes any electronic item—e-book, e-journal, electronic map (e-map), or streaming video—as a “Web resource.” In summer of 2011, the group plans to determine new material types to add in order to refine the electronic content for their users. Rice Sanders described how, for three years, they felt fairly confident about the new terms to include, such as e-book, e-map and e-journal. Now, with streaming video and other types of electronic content, the group needs to agree upon labels for other kinds of electronic content. Rice Sanders will need to make the material type changes to the database individually using Millennium's global update function, once the consortium has made the decision on which new material types to identify.
Applying information from the ERM adds coverage and access information not found in the catalog alone. With an example of two different e-books, Rice Sanders showed the enhanced data in the Encore record, which included indications of full-text access, and name of the originating resource or package. For journals, the range of holdings would also show. A recent change to the Encore skin prompted new ways of accessing information from the ERM. By opening the full record, the user can see the information about format, access, availability and so on. Rice Sanders is encouraging the member libraries to fill out the template she has set up, which is based on consortium purchasing details or information from publisher's websites. Currently, the set up for the libraries is about 40 percent complete, and many of the member libraries have greater interest in implementing the ERM piece.
To demonstrate the process of accessing information and resources from the member libraries digital repositories, Rice Sanders walked through the process of searching and discovery using the Encore platform. Continuing to use the search term “Newport,” she showed how to find materials from disparate places—from separate collections, that are on separate databases, added separately, developed separately—yet, because of the common platform, can be found easily by the researcher in one search. From the collections of various institutions, she found historical letters, menu collections, faculty papers, historical newspapers, primary materials from local organizations, photographic thumbnails, a peer-reviewed journal, seniors honors projects, dissertations and theses all relating to Rhode Island.
About a month ago, the consortium added Synergy, which harvests article content into Encore. This product adds a new type of discoverability for users, allowing them to mouse-over the article to view metadata for the article in Encore, and the facets for the articles originates with the native database. Currently, the consortium is using this with EBSCO Information Services databases and all of the facets appearing in Encore are expressed in the databases. Rice Sanders asked the audience to reflect on the importance of a journal as a container or even as a platform for articles in a world just beginning to embrace the emergence of articles alone.
McQuillan provided another example of a library using Content Pro for its digital repository and Encore as its discovery platform. The West Bloomfield Township Public Library has used Content Pro for about two years, creating eighteen collections. They decided on a digital repository when they worked on a project with the West Bloomfield Historical Society. They view the repository as a work in progress. On the main Web page, they decided they would highlight particular collections one by one. The Online Content Committee wanted internal and external collections to be relevant; they identified partners and volunteers to train and to help with the collections, and they hoped, through this process, to cut down on the amount of Web pages that required separate maintenance. They used the digital repository for a variety of tasks, including for instance, a sandbox for staff to tinker with ideas and images for future promotion or program use, image collections, video reviews by librarians, information and interior pictures of the library building itself, and a collection of video book reviews as part of a summer reading program, where patrons were filmed with flip cameras talking about a favorite book.
The session came to a close as McQuillan demonstrated other services, working in conjunction with the repository and discovery layer pieces. McQuillan showed how to use the facet “e-book” to narrow a search, how to provide enriched content using Content Café for book jackets, and the use of Pathfinder Pro for contextual linking. This way, the library maximizes its licensed electronic content, and the user more easily finds, not only content, but sources created or enhanced by members of their own community.
The session concluded with a question and answer opportunity for participants. An audience member commented that although the discovery layer was created to incorporate their locally digitized materials, she has found that the repository materials do not float to the top. She asked if they could suggest how to promote these types of materials in the discovery layer. Both Rice Sanders and McQuillan recommended relevance ranking to make these materials more findable.