The following is the text of an article published in Online Information Review, Vol.25, no.2, April 2001
Renardus: Fostering Collaboration between
Academic Subject Gateways in Europe
Lesly Huxley
Abstract
Renardus is a collaborative project of the EU's User-friendly Information Society programme with partners from national libraries, university research and technology centres and subject gateways Europe-wide. Its aim is to build a single service allowing users to search and browse existing Internet-accessible scientific and cultural resource collections distributed across Europe. Renardus builds on the successes of subject gateway initiatives in Europe and elsewhere, and is evolving a collaborative model for addressing the increasingly difficult issues of sustainability and scalability facing individual gateway services. Between January 2000-June 2002, the project will investigate related technical, information and organisational issues, build a pilot system and develop a fully-operational service. This paper describes the project's context, progress to date and outstanding issues. It also outlines the opportunities and benefits for future collaboration with other organisations in developing the fully-operational service.
Keywords
subject gateways, national libraries, collaboration, metadata, broker services, Europe
Introduction
During the past 5-6 years, many national, university and research libraries across Europe have taken advantage of the growing facilities offered via the World Wide Web to build quality-controlled subject gateways. Their aim: to assist users in their target communities (primarily staff and students in higher education learning and research) to find relevant, high quality resources on the Internet. They make use of the subject knowledge of information specialists and academics who filter, describe and classify Internet resources for inclusion in searchable and browsable Web-based gateway services.
As the Internet continues to grow, it is fast becoming clear that no single, publicly-funded gateway initiative can fully cover the tasks of identifying, evaluating, cataloguing and organising all the Internet resources to support the European user communities, even in a single subject area. The increasingly interdisciplinary and global natures of many fields of research mean that many users now have to visit several single-subject services in different countries in order to undertake a reasonably comprehensive search for quality Internet material. Scalability and sustainability are increasingly difficult issues. In a sense, the technology is the least of our problems: new business models are needed to ensure sustainability; new organisational models are needed to support the increasing moves to collaboration between existing subject gateway initiatives.
The Renardus project is one such collaborative venture. Its aim is to build an academic subject gateway 'broker' service for Europe: users will be able to search and browse - via a single Web interface - consistent views of data drawn from the many existing, distributed quality-controlled gateways and other Internet-accessible collections across Europe to support their learning and research. A pilot service, based on a limited number of project partners' existing gateway services, will be available for in-project evaluation in May 2001. Renardus is funded under the EU's 'User Friendly Information Societies' 5th framework programme and runs from 1 January 2000 to 30 June 2002, when the fully-operational service will be launched. The subject gateway information landscape was mapped in a special issue of Online Information Review in February 2000 (Vol.24 (1) 2000). This paper makes reference to several of the articles appearing in that issue and places the Renardus project in context through reference to these related initiatives, outlines project progress to date in functional, technical and information areas and highlights issues still to be addressed.
Renardus in context
Dempsey [1] describes the evolution of the subject gateways in the UK from 1995 onwards: to start with, many had a "significant R&D or project-based focus". The term 'subject gateway', with a number of variants, emerged during these early days, particularly in the research, educational or cultural domains, to describe "a network resource discovery service which provides database(s) of Internet resource descriptions with a specific subject focus and created according to specific selection and quality criteria" [1]. Koch [2] provides a useful typology of such gateway services intended to unravel some of the fine distinctions that can be perceived between different types of services in the areas of level and nature of quality criteria and quality control applied; the extent of metadata provided, and by whom; the intended scope (subject, geographic, language) and so on. This work was revisited as part of the initial scoping of the Renardus project, described later in this paper.
Renardus builds on the early successes of academic subject gateways in a number of European countries, such as the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG)[3] in the UK and The German Agricultural Information Network (DAINet)[4]. As is the case with many other subject gateways, SOSIG has moved from a centralised model (whereby all information gathering and description takes place in one institution) to a collaborative, distributed model involving contributing subject specialist partners from university libraries around the UK. EELS, the Engineering Gateway in Sweden[5] the German Special Subject Guides (SSG-FI[6] - described in more detail by Fischer and Neuroth[7]), and The DutchESS[8] service in The Netherlands all operate on a national scale, with cooperation and contributions from libraries across their respective countries. SOSIG is also part of a wider collaborative effort, the UK's Resource Discovery Network[9] developed as a federated service, again described by Dempsey, as a result of concerns over gaps in coverage and sustainability of funding for academic gateway services in the UK. In Finland, individual subject gateways also operate on a distributed basis and contribute records to the Finnish Virtual Library[10]. The Nordic countries have collaborated to develop an agriculture and forestry gateway, NOVAGate[11] whilst mathematicians can access relevant publications through the EULER[12] initiative which brings together information from across Europe. Emerging services based on a variety of models include the DEF [13] Danish Electronic Research Library), Bibsys[14] in Norway, and Les Signets[15], based at the National Library of France.
Renardus aims to build on these individual and collaborative initiatives: the fully-operational 'broker' service will allow extension of subject coverage to include a wide range of disciplines and resources identified and described by subject specialists from around Europe. Partner organisations[16] from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK (led by the National Library of the Netherlands[17]) are currently working together to address the considerable implications for development of both technical and information standards, business and sustainability issues. Overall, access to scientific and cultural resources in Europe should be improved through aggregation and improved consistency of collections and a common understanding of academic users' needs. Participating services should also benefit from the collaborative framework in terms of improved sustainability and a stronger position against international competition.
The Renardus service is being developed by some of the key players in the provision of high quality academic information services on the Web in Europe, and offers a technical, information and organisational model for collaboration. Of course, Europe is not the only region involved in developing subject gateway and similar services on the Internet. The Scout Report[18] project in the US has long provided North American users with access to a wide range of trusted, subject-based news and updates on new Internet services, with contributions from librarians, teachers, and subject specialists. In Australia, the National Library of Australia is encouraging collaboration between existing Australian subject gateways through development of an Australian Subject Gateways Forum[19]. Support and communication toolkits and fora have also been developed, including the DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook[20] (developed under another EU-funded project) and Imesh[21], an international initiative with the aim of supporting communication and collaboration amongst subject gateway providers and related parties. Details of other related projects and initiatives are available from the Renardus Web site[22].
Project Progress to date: an overview
Work on the Renardus project began in January 2000 and is distributed over three main phases: Data Gathering and Research; Analysis and Design and Implementation. A complementary element running through all phases involves Dissemination and Support to ensure full exploitation of - and participation in - the fully-operational Renardus service. Project work is divided into ten 'workpackages', each with a lead partner. There are a significant number of dependencies between the workpackages (listed below in table i):
Table i:
Renardus workpackages and lead partners|
Title: |
Lead partner: |
|
|
1 |
Functional Model |
UK Office of Library Information and Networking (UKOLN) |
|
2 |
Design and Implementation |
Technical Knowledge Centre and Library of Denmark (DTV) |
|
3 |
Organisational Infrastructure |
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands |
|
4 |
Service Provision |
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands |
|
5 |
Verification and Evaluation |
Finnish Virtual Library Project/Jyväskylä University Library (JyU) |
|
6 |
Data Model and Data Flow |
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB) |
|
7 |
Data Interoperability |
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB) |
|
8 |
Business Issues |
UK Office of Library Information and Networking (UKOLN) |
|
9 |
Dissemination and Support |
Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), Bristol, UK |
|
10 |
Project Management |
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands |
Full research reports for activities and deliverables in each of these areas are available from the Deliverables[23] section of the project Web site. Much of the data gathering and research work was completed in the first six months of the project. This was intended to inform the development of a functional specification to support the design and build of the pilot and, subsequently, the fully-operational service.
A year after our start date in January 2000, Project partners are currently on schedule, working through the first cycle of analysis and design to feed into the implementation of the pilot service. The results of the early work described below are currently informing the design and build of the pilot system and implementation of a testbed environment in which issues of data interoperability and multilinguality can be explored, albeit on a small scale. The pilot system will be available to participating gateways from late Spring 2001 and tested with the addition of at least one more gateway service. Subsequent iterations will involve a full evaluation programme engaging both providers and users to test both the pilot and first implementation of the final service. The fully-operational system will be implemented in June 2002.
Project progress: Renardus specification and design
Service scope
An early task for project partners was to agree the scope of the pilot system (and objectives for the fully-operational Renardus service). The resulting Scope Document[24] builds on the earlier work by Traugott Koch in establishing a typology of subject gateways[25] (extended in the DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook[20] and his article for OIR[2]). It addresses issues such as subject and geographical coverage, definitions and criteria for participating gateways. Renardus partners have agreed an initial set of thirteen starting points for the pilot system: the intention is to refine these as the project progresses and the Internet information landscape - the context for Renardus' development - evolves. In terms of the gateway typology, a number of new concepts are introduced, including the notion of an "open subject gateway" and "resource discovery broker service".
Renardus aims to provide a broker service to and from other resource discovery services, including single gateways or other brokers to a number of gateways. In order to participate in Renardus, as well as meeting the criteria for the definition of "quality-controlled subject gateways and resource discovery broker services", gateways will also need to be 'open'. By this we mean that they "support a mechanism that enables third parties to collect or query the resource descriptions and subject-labels created by the subject gateway" to enable development of broker services[24].
Functional and technical requirements
One of the biggest challenges for those who are currently developing digital libraries is how best to provide integrated access to the wide range of distributed and heterogeneous Internet information resources and services available. Renardus partners undertook an extensive and comprehensive review of 18 existing broker models chosen for their perceived relevance to Renardus' digital library context. The review 'mapped' each model against the generic model known as the MODELS Information Architecture (MIA)[26], resulting in four broad categories on a continuum from simple to complex. At the same time, Renardus partners collated user requirements at various levels, including an investigation of target service provider (ie participating gateways) requirements in the areas of interoperability, interface and 'branding' issues, and a synthesis of end users' needs drawn from existing evaluations of partners' subject gateway services. Analysis of the results of these reviews has fed directly into the current design phase.
A significant driver in the development and design of the Renardus service was the fact that respondents to a survey of service providers rejected the concept of a central repository to which all metadata from the distributed gateways is routinely copied. Their preference was for a centralised subject index which would forward queries generated by a user's search or browse activity to relevant gateways, based on 'administrative' collection level information provided by participating services. This is a somewhat different approach to that being advocated by, for example, the Australian Subject Gateways Forum initiative, whereby a central repository for metadata is currently recommended[27].
Service providers also specified the metadata schemas and protocols Renardus should support (Dublin Core[28] semantics and RDF/XML[29] syntax for metadata records, with Z39.50[30] and WHOIS++[31] used as protocols for communication between Renardus and the brokered gateways). The review of broker models also showed clearly that the majority of other similar services were using either HTML or Z39.50. Renardus partners have therefore agreed to design an architecture for Renardus which requires participating gateways to implement a local Renardus server (using Z39.50), providing for normalisation of data compatible with the 'Renardus profile' (the data model).
The user interface for the pilot service is currently being developed, based on feedback from a range of end user surveys which offered insights into user search/browse behaviours and preferences and an initial analysis ('Use Cases') of the functional requirements from both end user and provider perspectives. The Use cases are descriptions of how various 'players' will actually use the service, without specifying any technical solutions for how this functionality might be achieved. End user use cases cover functions such as: performing a simple search, cross-browsing by subject, selecting language or subject gateway filters, or displaying results. From the perspective of service administrators, other use cases cover requirements such as: maintaining metadata indexes, assuring data quality, or inserting data into Renardus. The use cases and activity diagrams are based on the Unified Modelling Language (UML)[32] and are available from the Web site[33]. This functional specification work is closely linked with the earlier user requirements work, the scoping of the pilot service and development of the data model and technical solutions.
Data model
Gateway service providers were also asked to complete questionnaires about their collection descriptions, target audiences, resource categories, quality criteria, controlled vocabularies etc., as well as descriptions of their respective metadata sets. From this, lead partners in this area, the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen[34] (SUB), have drawn up a metadata mapping as the basis of a minimum common set of metadata elements. Four of the gateways have metadata schemes based on IAFA/ROADS templates, two use individual schemes, and two use schemes based on Dublin Core. Renardus partners have developed a minimum common set of metadata elements supported by participating gateways as the first steps towards defining the data model for the service.
The data model will continue to be developed and refined as the pilot system is built and tested. The following elements will form the basis of the minimum set for the pilot (those marked * are mandatory): DC.Title*; DC.Creator, DC.Description*, DC.Identifier*, DC.Subject*, DC.Language and DC.Type; Country (all but this latter are Dublin Core elements). Participating gateways will need to provide these 'content' data elements via local Renardus servers, in addition to a variety of 'administrative' information, including a collection-level description, based on the RSLP Collection Description Schema[35]. In future developments, it is also recommended that Renardus should support the Rights element (in the sense of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), Rights should contain information about access conditions/restrictions of the resource and should contain copyright/IPR information of the resource as well) and a Publisher element.
Negotiations with OCLC have allowed project partners to proceed with the implementation of high-level cross-mapping between participating gateways' classification schemes and the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme (DDC[36]) for those gateways that wish to participate in the cross-browsing feature of the service.
Outstanding Issues: Sustainability and Organisation
Business issues are an important - but often neglected - part of the development of sustainable gateway services, whether as single services or in some form of collaboration. Gateway services in Europe are increasingly in transition from short-term funded 'research and development project' status to fully-operational 'service' status with the requirement for longer-term sustainability. The problem is not confined to Europe: the Australian Subject Gateways Forum notes similar issues[37]. Intellectual Property rights are also an issue for collaborative services: who owns the data, who is responsible for quality and maintenance, how can income streams be developed? Renardus partner UKOLN[38] has provided a starting point in a wide-ranging review[39] of business models in operation in gateways outside the Renardus project (a detailed review of participating gateways' business models will be the focus of a later deliverable). Business, legal and organisational issues could be seen together as an additional strand of the interoperability problem faced by collaborative 'broker' services such as Renardus: one that may ultimately be more difficult to solve than the technical and standards-based interoperability problems that formed part of the focus of 'first-generation' gateway-related projects like ROADS[40] and DESIRE[41].
Work is currently underway on issues relating to the organisational structure that might be adopted by the fully-operational Renardus service. Partners are considering an overview of the existing 'landscape', that is: which collaborative models are already in place; what kind of organisational models have existing services adopted; in particular, what is the current and potential future role of national institutions. In further discussion, project partners will need to address questions such as "should national institutions play a key role in coordinating activities?"; "should the organisational framework be based directly on collaboration between the gateways themselves?". The answers to these and other questions will inform the development of the organisational model to be adopted by Renardus: draft recommendations on the roles and responsibilities of a number of different groups with technical, contractual and support foci, have already been put forward for discussion by partners at their next meeting in Helsinki in March 2001. The next steps will be to define this still further in line with organisational procedures for the service. These will cover in detail the procedures for, for example, day-to-day administration, user and service provider support, internal and external communication and the gathering and analysis of statistics and user feedback. Procedures, which will be further developed into guidelines for participating services, will also cover the application procedures for the participation of new data providers and quality control and assurance.
Finding out more: Renardus dissemination and support
The dissemination and support team based at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology[42] at the University of Bristol, UK, has developed and maintains the project Web site. Regularly-updated features include the 'Talking Heads' section, where project partners provide informal 'interview style' comments on project work in progress, and the bi-monthly email newsletter, the Renardus News Digest[43] (archived on the Web site). Deliverable reports are supplemented by 'Digest Summaries', synopses of key elements of the latest project outcomes. Brief descriptions of, and links to, related projects and services are provided in the Related Reading section.
The project logo is a fox, based on the project name which stems from the character found in Neo-Latin literature. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia[44], in the 12th century the 'animal epic' in which Renardus appears was extended (probably from Magister Nivardus of Flanders) under the title "Ysengrimus" or "Renardus Vulpes" (Renardus the Fox). A range of promotional materials including fliers and posters has been developed to spread the word about the project: visitors to the Web site and readers of the News Digest are invited to 'follow the fox' by reading partners' conference papers or journal articles online, or speak to them in person at forthcoming events.
Encouraging further collaboration
User guidelines (currently in their first draft) will be developed to facilitate participation by subject gateways in the Renardus broker service. These requirements will be drawn up based on some of the early work of the project described above and continuing work on technical standards and solutions, metadata model, business and organisational issues. We shall also be presenting a workshop in Autumn 2001 to support services interested in participating in the service. Identification of potential participants is underway and Renardus partners are particularly keen to enter dialogue with other initiatives across Europe which may want to participate in the fully-operational broker service. The information discovery landscape is changing rapidly, with new initiatives and new collaborations emerging. Contact details and a feedback form are available from the Web site: Renardus partners would be pleased to learn from other collaborations and partnerships and welcome feedback and discussion on any part of the project.
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