Weibel Lines

RESTful Repositories?

Andy Powell has made notable contributions to best practices concerning persistent identifiers for quite a long time.  I have always found his recommendations practical and free of ego.  I almost said free of ideology, but of course we all suffuse our musings with the aggregate of experience and beliefs which round to ideology.  The ideology of others tends to disappear to the extent that it matches our own.  Protective coloring rears its barely-discernible head.

Andy's opening keynote at the VALA2008 conference in Melbourne a fortnight ago exposed a theme of his ideology which serves the community well in the domain of persistent identifiers, and which he brings to bear on the evolution of repositories.  I paraphrase:

Deviation from mainstream Web idioms reduces uptake and quenches the natural interconnectivity which underlies the richness of the Web.

Andy's own summary of the issues includes the following:

our current preoccupation with the building and filling of 'repositories' (particularly 'institutional repositories') rather than the act of surfacing scholarly material on the Web means that we are focusing on the means rather than the end (open access). Worse, we are doing so using language that is not intuitive to the very scholars whose practice we want to influence.

One way to think about repositories is as the bookshelves of the digital library.  They are designed to impose order and facilitate management of content.  We don't ask scholars, having just published an article or book, to 'go to the library to find the most appropriate place for it... and don't come back until you do!'  Not a perfect analogy, but it speaks to the issue of mandating overhead to authors in order that their work is fixed in the scaffold of their discipline's knowledge stores.  Still, we have bookshelves for a reason, and something like them is necessary to support the management of digital assets as well.  It is hard enough to look after digital resources in a persistent way.  Current repository technology is not yet mature, for sure, but it isn't the case that we don't need what it is trying to deliver. (I don't think Andy would disagree with this).

Andy goes on to say:

our focus on the 'institution' as the home of repository services is not aligned with the social networks used by scholars...  As a result, we resort to mandates and other forms of coercion in recognition that we have not, so far, built services that people actually want to use. We have promoted the needs of institutions over the needs of individuals.

Well, yes, but it isn't as though we don't see this all the time.  It is a rare case when the institutions I have administrative dealings with tailor their procedures and requirements to my needs.  Instead, procedures are designed to increase management efficiency, often at the time-expense of individuals.  I myself have been known to whine about just such impositions (duh), but presumably, the gains in efficiencies of such requirements redound to the general benefit of all.  Thats the theory, anyway.  Sometimes its even true.

The question of where the natural home for repository functionality might be is tricky.  Lorcan Dempsey refers to institutional reputation management -- a natural and important piece of the puzzle.  Publishers are loathe to lose control of the content, but their time is passing... open access is simply too compelling a juggernaut to be resisted.  OA is a when question, not an if question. Professional societies want to play, and some of them sit, somewhat uncomfortably, astride the roles of domain advocacy and commercial publishing. Witness the American Chemical Society doing the splits as the open data boat slowly slides away from the commercial asset management pier.

It is still possible that another entirely different model will emerge... more in-the-cloud.  A distributed model does seem to complicate curation, (and that institutional reputation thing), but I wouldn't count it out just yet.  Still, some institution has to take care of this stuff... responsibility involves the attachement to artifacts, even if they are bitstreams.

Andy goes on to appeal for more RESTful architectural design, and in this I think he is dead on the mark:

the 'service oriented' approaches that we have tended to adopt in standards like the OAI-PMH, SRW/SRU and OpenURL sit uncomfortably with the 'resource oriented' approach of the Web architecture and the Semantic Web.  We need to recognise the importance of REST as an architectural style and adopt a 'resource oriented' approach at the technical level when building services.

There are some details of Andy's perspective that I'm happy to contend, but as usual he forces our attention back to design for the Web, of the Web, by the Web.  Sounds pretty much right to me. An excellent keynote to start off VALA 2008.

Post Script: Speaking of architectures, I see that Roy Fielding, the prime progenitor of all things RESTful, has tired of endlessly explaining the same things on list-after-list, and has started a blog.  This is welcome news indeed.  And you gotta love his colorful domain name.
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Public sculpture along the Southbank Promenade of the Yarra River in Melbourne

 

Copyright Toolbox

The great thing about blogging is that the publisher and the creator are the same, so blame is easy to assign, hard to wriggle out of, and the term-negotiation process is fast and amicable (sure, stu, take an extra week on that post...).

Traditional publication processes are not so easy, of course, with those pesky reviewers and editors, publication delays and more.  Publication agreements, though, haven't been much problem for me, because I've either just signed something or passed it off to someone else to worry about. 

I am cavalier about this because there seem to be no real consequences for me one way or another.  What I write in the conduct of my job is, technically, work for hire.  OCLC owns it.  What I write for, say, Fine Homebuilding, is mine. Other areas are muddier. My book reviews in my blog?  Ruminations on identifiers?  Beats me.  No publishers seem to be beating a path to my door pleading for redistribution rights, so the question is moot.

The majority of my musings are valuable only to the extent that they move freely in public discourse.  To protect them is to kill them. So, I seldom publish anywhere where there are legal impediments.  DLib Magazine's agreement is my favorite approach, but it is not typical of commercial publishers for obvious reasons.

I suspect most authors have more serious concerns about the terms of publication of their scholarly products than I do.  What is the right balance between the rights of authors and publishers, and how can this balance be embedded in legal agreements?  This is focus of the Copyright Toolbox, an effort sponsored by JISC and SURF in Europe.

Wilma Mossink is the architect of this enlightened approach to the management of scholarly publishing, having pulled together important components from a variety of stakeholders.  The toolbox provides sample text that can be used in publishing agreements, all keyed to a framework for balancing the interests of authors and publishers (with reference also to the host institutions of authors and libraries). 

This explication of the rights of stakeholders is the fruit of several years of discussion on the subject (aggregated under the moniker of The Zwolle Group), and provides a thoughtful context for making morally and economically sound judgements about managing scholarly communication in a landscape that is slippery with change and treacherous with competing interests. 

As an individual, I find it hard to imagine sitting down and working through these principles and adopting text for my own publishing agreements.  I'm not well-known for my attention span in the face of even straightforward legalese.  And when the change of a word or comma can invoke the attentions of costly legal expertise, its best for amateurs like me to 'not try this at home'.

What is the point of the toolbox, then?  Well, some of you writers out there will have a financial stake in your words that I do not, and understanding a conceptual framework of balanced rights is a useful starting point for negotiating your interests.  There may be a broader benefit, however, in catalyzing discussions at organizational levels where the boilerplate of our lives is conjured.  Kudos to Wilma Mossink, and to SURF and JISC, for providing such a framework, clearly articulated and packaged, to assist in advancing this discussion.

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Image: Purple starfish awaiting the return of the tide on the rocky shores of Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC.  This magnificent park, patterned loosely on the work of Olmstead and Central Park, is actually larger than the NYC version.  I've never encountered a city feature that so naturally couples city life and the out of doors.  September, 2006

Digital Repository Interoperability

Microsoft, the Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, and the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK, jointly sponsored a meeting in April of 2006 to promote discussion and consensus on the characteristics of digital repositories that need to be standardized in order to promote desirable levels of interoperability. The list of sponsors is a strong clue to the importance of this somewhat esoteric topic. What is at stake is a common set of functionality that will support automated interchange across a wide spectrum of repositories and assuring auditable provenance for managed materials. Not a modest objective.

The final report for this meeting is available at the Mellon Foundation. It is not casual reading, intended to capture a discussion rather than characterize the state of the art, though readers may find the background materials and recommendations generally useful.

Those conversant with digital library research may be familiar with the early work of Robert Kahn and Robert Willenski on repository architectures. It is interesting to note that, a dozen years later, there still is no commonly agreed terminology, let alone a universally accepted model for this critical piece of digital library infrastructure. It is a reminder of how new our digital workspace is, and how much effort remains to achieve even a rudimentary infrastructure for supporting reliable, persistent access to electronic assets.

There is inherent tension between standardization and localized design, especially in an unstable technological environment. Builders want to build, not reconcile. The conferees at this meeting (largely implementors of early repository systems) did not even entirely agree on which aspects of functionality should be considered core for interoperability purposes (though progress was made towards this goal).

It is perhaps not astounding that understanding of repository core functionality is not so different now than in 1995. The Kahn-Willenski list included (I paraphrase) access, deposit, and tell-me-more. The 2006 meeting agreed on obtain and harvest, and talked at length about whether put should be there. The notions map roughly across the intervening years, though current understanding of the underlying details far exceeds the 1995 model.

If this sounds like scant progress for a decade, keep in mind that a great deal of experience has been garnered through the deployment of DSpace, arXiv, Fedora, ePrints aDORe and the like – serious repository applications that afford the practical experience necessary to bring together common expectations on how these technologies will work together.

The problem is broad in scope… a data model and architecture to support documents, data archives, and  formats, policies, and recombinant practices that are to a significant degree yet undeveloped.  The architecture must accommodate the functional requirements of disparate domains with entirely different business models, legal requirements, and data demands.  As the first crop of serious repository applications have matured, the field is now ready for the harder task of bringing these efforts into an interoperable framework. This meeting will have helped to focus attention and effort on this important goal and set the stage for additional progress.

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Image: Downtown Seattle from Elliot Bay, July, 2006

 

Speaking of Hybrid Technology...

My friend Jean Armour Polly used to sport a sig file  that went something like:

"Don’t underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of CDs on an interstate highway"

Text ruled the net, and transferring images required strategic use of bandwidth if you even had a monitor that supported them. Quaint in today’s first-world telecom environment. But with nearly half the world having never made a phone call, and something like a third unconected to the power grid, the characteristics of technology diffusion are of course different elsewhere.

A colleague sent me the attached picture. Guy on a motorbike, right? Look carefully at his rider… a brief-case-size box with an antenna.  The fellow rides from village to village, his wireless antenna collecting and delivering store-and-forward email and Internet searches, then 'delivering them' to the central wireless hub, and round and round it goes. 

This clever approach to low-cost networking comes from First Mile Solutions of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  They are in the technology transfer business -- deploying low-cost, hybrid technology solutions developed at MIT and intended to help bring the "next 2 billion people" on board the Internet. The website is a rich store of project descriptions, white papers, and planning tools to rough out a project.

 

ReMIX

Readers of Web4Lib will have seen a version of this post on that list.  Take the rest of the day off!

The discussion on Web4Lib concerns the relative merits of metadata-based retrieval and full text, link-enhanced retrieval.  It raises interesting questions of great import to libraries in particular and information retireval in general.

Certainly we all agree that Google-like searching is powerful and useful. Our further hope and prejudice (given that metadata puts food on many of our tables) is that augmenting it with metadata search will improve retrieval in some use-cases with some resource classes. 

Testing this hypothesis has always been fraught with overwhelming experimental difficulty and a substantial component of ideological bias. Indeed, as far as I know, there has never even been a serious attempt at arriving at an estimate of the cost effectiveness of MARC.  Of course its good! Right? RIGHT???

As Google Print and its various spawn develop, the possibility of tractable experimentation is upon us.  Students of information retrieval will know of the TREC effort: information retrieval experimentation based on formal test collections.  Perhaps it is time for ReMIX: Resource Metadata and IndeXing Experiments?

What are the domains of investigation? A quick list from the top of my head:

• Nature of metadata
  • User-created
  • Library-created versus...?
  • Richness (MARC, DC, MODS, IEEE-LOM, ONIX...)
• Nature of resources
  • Age
  • Type (books, articles, web resources, collections...)
• Information use cases
  • Scholarly discovery
  • Commercial
  • End-user medical, legal, Government information....
  • User-types
  • ?

Desirable elements:

• A neutral home
• A standard experimental corpus, balanced (whatever that means) and freely available
• Open access indexes and linking information
• Open access metadata of various types available to all
• Open-Data repositories for the experimental results

In other words, an open-access community-based project where the gradual accretion of knowledge on the subject would help all players understand the benefits of each mode, and combined modes as well, so as to improve retrieval performance and promote the development of more powerful systems over time.

 

Wellcome News

Hybrid Models: improved mileage for your scholarly-publishing dollar

Hybrid models are showing up in journal publishing, an old idea with new relevance. As a graduate student in pharmacology in the 70’s,  page charges were a common feature of publishing (the number I recall was on the order of $50/page, paid through grants). A paper I published circa 1978 ran about a dozen pages, or $600 USD. In today’s dollar, that is between $1,400 and $2,800 USD, depending on your favorite economic deflator (my colleague, Brian Lavoie, our resident economagician, kindly pointed out this useful conversion site… use it on your kids next time they ask for more allowance).

The numbers I heard bandied about at CERN this past week at OA-4 ranged from $900 to $3,000 USD, per article. Not so very different… and in fact, pretty reasonable from a historical perspective (especially given that page charges then were in addition to subscriptions, not an alternative). What part of the research budget is that? According to estimates of one of the world’s largest private funders of biomedical research, it ranges from 1–2%. And the Wellcome Trust is putting its money where… well… where its money is. All awards tendered after October of 2005 will include a requirement for publication in Open Access journals, or at the least, archiving in PubMed Central (with a maximum embargo period of 6 months), and they will support hybrid models as one means to assure this goal. 

Wellcome’s welcome announcement bespeaks a major commitment to Open Access that others, it is to be hoped, will follow. But there is an interesting twist from the point of view of libraries. The hybrid model, if successful, will move dissemination dollars out of the library (subscription) budget and into the research budget. Indeed, in the case of PubMed repositories, the library isn’t in the loop at all. In fact, there are interesting issues to sort out when a given manuscript might be at home in several repositories: global or national, subject-based, and institutional. For all that, the author-pays model, resulting in access for all… and all time, is hard to resist.

Wellcome comes to these policies after careful study, and the supporting reports they commissioned along the way are interesting reading for many reasons.  One provocative entry:

When readers are required to pay high prices for accessing research outputs, they would be expected to abandon high-priced journals and substitute them from other sources, but readers are ‘protected’ from these price implications through the library system. The market is, in this respect, highly inefficient.

Gee, and we thought we were part of the solution, not the problem!  It’s not as simple as my out-of-context quote. But the slow train wreck we’ve watched develop in journal pricing over the years is creating incentives for Open Access, including hybrid models, and business model changes will inevitably influence all the players in the supply chain.  The library model of "make it look free" may feel pressure from the Open Access model of making it look even freer. 

The  Suber-seeded among us may recognize these reports as old news, but if you haven't read them, they are worth careful attention. Read the bones of our future, downloadable (Open Access, bien sûr!) from the Wellcome site:

Costs and business models in scientific research publishing
April 2004

 Economic analysis of scientific research publishing
January 2003

Oy! I is here

In 1994, I was fortunate enough to land a scarce registration for the hot conference of the year – The first international World Wide Web conference, held at CERN, birthplace of the Web.   Everyone at that event understood it as a singularity of sorts – an inflection point that would change our futures.  I began this post sitting again in the conference room where early discussions of extending that singularity took place (next steps, future conferences, the beginnings of what would later become the W3C). Eleven years later, the aging infrastructure of CERN’s main building is witnessing another conference that may not be quite as buzzy as WWW1, but is exciting and revolutionary in its own right. OAI-4 has its roots in the geeky domain of the Open Archive Initiative, a topic of high visibility and clear importance for technical librarianship. OAI, in tandom with OA (Open Access) has emerged from its technical chrysalis.

The geeks here are sprinkled among policy types, librarians, deployers, and the odd funder, publisher, and copyright lawyer.  Many, if not most, of the attendees are here as actors with feet muddied in the realities of planning, supporting, or growing institutional repositories of one sort or another – and dealing with the policy issues that sprout everywhere from this fertile soil. 

If the A in OAI is for Archives, the A here is Access.  Day one was largely given over to the geeks, led by OAI -Ubergeek Herbert Von de Sompel.   And while there were plenty of eager listeners to hear about the latest repository federation architectures, persistent identifiers, and a raft of quite novel applications, including my colleague Jeff Young's elegant work on WikiD (Wikis for structured data and collections). But clearly the hundred and a half attendees are more concerned with  ‘takers than makers’ (as Lorcan Dempsey is wont to say).  This is good.   

Day two has been about a movement, not an application, and that movement has the feel of an irrepressible here and now.  Conventional wisdom about conferences is that most learning takes place between sessions.  While that sort of learning is no doubt happening here, the biggest frustration  thus far is wanting to hear more from many of the speakers.  Particularly notable were presentations by SURF’s  Wilma Mossink on copyright, and Alma Swan, whose What’s New in OA talk was full of numbers, insight and wit. Rare cases of regret on both sides of the podium for the tyranny of the conference clock.

More from CERN soon... I need to pay attention to the podium.

Addenda:

Apologies that some of these links go to the Agenda page, not directly to the presentation... the conference linking at this writing is a bit inconsistent.

A note about CERN.  The physical plant of the older, main buildings has a familiar shabbiness that many university habitues will recognize.  It feels not a whit different than a decade ago, but the people are effusively helpful and the hostel has the virtues of spare cleanliness and crawlability-from-the-restaurant (oh... and its inexpensive).  CERN is the World's largest particle laboratory, and bustles with erudite anticipation for the opening of the latest version of the world's largest particle accelerator.  Stuck as I am in the image of the Bohr atom, color me awestruck.