JISC Resource Discovery Task Force
A Vision for Resource Discovery for the UK HE and Research Sectors
Michael Jubb
1. Overall Vision
1.1 Scope
This vision covers discovery services for quality assured material –whether physical, digital handheld, or online - held in or licensed by academic and research libraries, and in accredited museums, archives and data centres in the UK.
1.2 Platforms
There should be single platforms covering content for the whole UK in the form of
books and book chapters, including reports and grey literature
scholarly journals and articles therein
data available through accredited repositories and data centres
the contents of museums and galleries
the publicly-available contents of archives and record offices
The platorms should be separate and distinct; based on agreed standards and formats; and built to facilitate interoperability and the sharing of metadata between them.
1.3 Access to metadata
Full metadata records – both for individual items and in the aggregate - should be freely available to individual end-users and to organisations without charge, excdept where privacy, confidentiality or security considerations dictate otherwise. There should be no restrictions on re-use.
There should be managed arrangements for adding to or amending the core metadata on each platform.
1.4 Value-added services and enhancements
Individuals and organisations – both for-profit and not-for-profit, and operating various business models –should be free to build enhanced services based on the data available from the core platforms: subject and disciplinary aggregations (both within and across platforms); semantic enrichments; ontologies; faceted descriptions; and so on.
2. Rationale
The central need for end-users is discovery services with the widest possibe coverage of well-understood categories of quality-assured content.
UK-wide and comprehensive aggregations of metadata, and unrestricted access to them, would
meet the needs of end-users and promote community engagement with content
provide an efficient service for all the players in the metadata and cataloguing supply chain, and avoid wasteful duplication of effort
provide the opportunity for linkages to global web-scale services
provide linkages back to local services, and the opportunity for the development of new value-added services.
3. Books and book chapters
A single shared catalogue for the whole HE and research library sector, including the BL, with metadata for e-books as well as physical books, and for grey literature held in libraries.
Programme for dealing with cataloguing backlogs and retroconversion of card catalogues in place.
Standards agreed - by publishers, aggregators and other intermediaries, and libraries - for core standardised description and central authority data.
Dynamic links to local data, including library management systems, local user-generated data (tags, ratings, reviews etc),recommender systems based on clickstreams etc.
Syndication to global web-scale services.
4. Scholarly journals
Aggregated lists of titles, with authority control over title variations, made available for link resolvers.
XML or similar catalogues of contents provided by publishers for harvesting, with RSS feeds and OpenURL linking.
Linkages to relevant data holdings.
5. Data
Integrated subject catalogues of datasets, with metadata including “bibliographic”, geographical, methodological, temporal etc information and documentation, along with linkages to associated book and journal publications, related datasets etc.
6. Museums and galleries
Aggregation of metadata in museum content management systems made available online
Images and contextual information provided
Programme for dealing with cataloguing backlogs and retroconversion of card catalogues in place, with clear criteria for when collection or item-level descriptions are required.
Linkages to relevant scholarly literature.
7. Archives
Single gateway to EAD collection-level and item-level descriptions of records held in all UK record offices and archives.
Linkages to relevant scholarly literature.