Consortium Approach for Building

Digital Libraries

Moving towards a National Consortium

by

Dr. Jagdish AroraLibrarian, IIT Delhi &

National Coordinator, INDEST Consortium

http://paniitd.iitd.ac.in/indest/jarora@library.iitd.ac.in

27 Feb., 2004 ICDL 2004

This presentation includes:

Consortium: Players

INDEST Consortium: Basic Model

Consortium Services

Important Characteristics of Successful Consortium

Centrally-funded Consortium: Associated Problems

Strategic Implementation Issues

Digital Collection Development amongst Member Libraries

Proposal for a National Consortium in India

Conclusion

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LibrariesGreater bargaining powerCost SavingsAdditional Purchase power

ConsortiumWin-Win Situation

PublishersSingle-point negotiationGreater market + ExpansionConsolidated ordering, payment &renewal

UsersConvenient accessMore Resources

VendorsNew Role, New avenuesto increase theirincreased revenue

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INDEST Consortium: Basic Model

The MHRD provides funds to the INDEST consortium:

• For subscription to electronic resources for institutes funded by it; and

• For operational cost of the Consortium.

Open-ended Consortium: Self- subscribing institutions + Member institutions

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INDEST Consortium: Members

Members

Core Members38 (Funds for e-resources through MHRD)

Members with AICTE Support 60

Self-supported Members27

Total 125

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E-Resources being Subscribed under the consortium

Full-text Resources

IEL Online

Elsevier’s ScienceDirect + Academic Press’ Ideal

Springer’s: Link

ABI / Inform

Proquest’s Science

ACM Digital Library

Databases

Compendex +

INSPEC

SciFinder Scholar

MathSciNet

Web of Science

JCCC

Jgate

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Additional Resources for INDEST Consortium (2004)

– New Resources for 2004

– Science

– Nature

– EBSCO Business Source Premier

– Emerald Full-text

– Science Direct for IIMs

– Euromonitor (GMID)

– Capitaline

– JCCC (for IIMs)

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Transforming Consortium

Loose Federations and

Buying Clubs

Centrally OrganizedService Delivery

Organizations

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Consortium Services

E-resources purchasing

Resources sharing

JCCC@INDEST

Educational programs: Training of users / training the trainees

Training programmes (decentralized: All IITs / IISc to organize training programmes at various levels)

Annual Meet

Theme Conference

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Consortium Services

Technology support to member institutions

Computerization, Digitization

Shared technology systems

Federated Search Application Service Provider (ASP) Union Catalogue

Joint storage facilities

Journal Archives Backfiles

Shared core collections

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Consortium Services

Shared digital library project development (INDEST Extended)

Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD)

Union Catalogue of Journals

Union Catalogue of Books (LibSys Z39.50 Architecture)

Shared E-reference / Live Reference Service

Library of Congress Collaborative Digital Reference Service (http://www.loc.gov/rr/digref/cdrshome.html)

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Important characteristics of successful consortium Sustenance and Continuity

MHRD and AICTE is committed to provide sustained support, separate budget head created

Agile

Active support from members, ministry and headquartersResources based on Usage

Collaborative Working: Active Contributing Members

Creative and innovative organization

Head-quarters at the IIT DelhiNational Steering Committee National Review CommitteeSpecial Interest Groups

Valuable programs and services

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Important characteristics of successful consortium

Committed membership

Core Members (38)

AICTE-Supported Members (60)

Self-supported Members (27)

Clear Funding and Ownership

Strong Leadership / Governance

Agreed Management strategy

Adequate staffing

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Important characteristics of successful consortium

Continuous communication

At Consortium level

INDEST Mailing List

INDEST Web Site

Workshops / Annual Meet

Usage Statistics

JCCC

Online Questionnaire to coax institutions to take action

At Institutional level

User Convention

User Group

Training Programme at Institutions by vendors

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Important characteristics of successful consortium

Shared Vision

User’s Involvement in the Process of Resource Selection

Larger Spread of Consortium to attract interest of the publisher

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Centrally-funded Consortium: Associated Problems

Centrally-funded Consortium: INDEST / CSIR / DAE-Science Direct / INFLIBNET- INFONET

Associated problems: Strategic Implementation Issues

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Strategic Implementation Issues

Usage Monitoring

Most resources have web-based interfaces to view the usage statistics

Usage Statistics are mailed to member institutions by the Consortium

Questionnaire to coax institutions to take action

Resources based on Usage

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Strategic Implementation Issues

Regional Coordinators

Copyright and IPR Issue

E-Resources are licensed, not purchased

IPR issues have different implications in electronic environment

Reliability of Connectivity

All institutions are getting funds to increase their connectivity and bandwidth

Categorization of Institutions based on usage

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Strategic Implementation Issues

Training of Users

Training of Trainers

Archival Access / back-up

Perpetual access from publishers site (Science Direct)

Local Host (ACM Digital Library)

CDs / DVDs (with search interface along with Web Access)

Passive back-up on CDs (Most publishers)

Active back-up on Intranet Servers / Consortium Web

Servers with Search Software (JCCC)

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Proposal for a National Consortium in India

Logic

Educational and research in India are mostly funded by the Government;

Most educational / research institutions fall under 10 –12 ministries;

Larger number of Consortium members will bring greater bargaining power to the consortium and greater benefits to members.

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Proposal for a National Consortium in India

Strategy

Ministries / Departments forms committees / sub-committees representing all Departments to:

Expanding on existing resources of INDEST and UGC-INFONET, identify additional resources of common interest;

Negotiate with the publishers for the best rates of subscription and terms of reference with committee representing all departments;

Expand structure of INDEST Consortium to function as a national Consortium;

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Strategy (Continue)Provide financial resources for:

Ensure availability of sufficient bandwidth and network connections to all participating institutions;

Establishing fibre optic-based high speed Campus LAN in each of the networked institutions (if the infrastructure does not exist);

Establishing physical and computer infrastructure for the consortium. The INDEST consortium can be expanded to function as national consortium;

Provide funds for subscription to core electronic resources that would be used by the institutions under a given ministry;

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Strategy (Continue)Consortia-based subscription to electronic resources not included in core subscription will be borne from participating institutions;

Amount involved in consortia-based subscription to electronic resources would be diverted directly from funding agency to the National Consortium.

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INDEST National Consortium

MHRD38 Core INDEST

Members

AICTE(60 institutions)

Other Ministries

Other Institutions

(self-support)

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Digital Library

Content Creation“Bon Digital”

Portal SitesConversion

Print to DigitalIntegrated

Access

Buying AccessE-Resources

AcquiringDigital Media

Content Creation“Born Digital”

Building Digital Library

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Acquisition of Collections available in Digital Formats

CD ROM / DVD ROM Databases

Indian Standards / ASTM Standards

Local Hosting: ACM Digital Library

Mirror Servers: UGC Infornet

Silver Platter’s ERL Technology: Silver Linker

Networked CD ROM: Caching CD ROM Contents on Intranet

Server

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Buying Access to External Digital Collections

Buying Access: Electronic Journals (6,000+)

Online Databases

Already being practiced through the INDEST Consortium

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Creating Open-source Digital Collection (“Born Digital”)

Internet-based digital depositories of quality scholarly publications;

Interoperable, open-access content repositories distributed across institutions;

– Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Implemented at IIT Bombay and IIT Kanpur

– Preprint Servers for the Consortium

OAI-complaint software to ensure interoperability of digital collections

OAI-complaint software: D-Space, E-print Archives, CDSWare, etc. being tested

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Develop templates using standard formats such as Dublin Core / MARC for creating records in e-

print archives

Develop detailed guidelines to set-up and implement e-print archives at each institution;

Institutions in Consortium would be encouraged to set-up e-print archive servers

INDEST Headquarters to develop and set-up data harvesting server for harvesting metadata from multiple institutional depositories

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Conversion of Existing Print Media into Digital Format

Collaborative scanning of printed material across all consortium members (specially IITs and IISc)

Adopt standards / protocols / procedures for scanning of material

IPR issues

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Portal Sites or Gateways to the Electronic Resources

Catalogue Internet resources in a collaborative mode

Pathfinders for electronic resources available on the Internet

Standards format (like Dublin Core) and a public-domain software can be used for setting up the such a site

Project CORC: Collaborative Efforts towards Cataloguing Internet Resources

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Providing Integrated Access to Resources

Science Direct

EBSCO Wiley Link

ABI / INFORM

LibraryUser

Library OPAC

In-house Digitizedmaterial

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Local set of links to full text resources proves inefficient & difficult to maintain

Integration at resource level (not article level)

Search Options for journal Titles through Library OPAC or through Independent Search interface

Search option at article level is not available

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Bibliographic Databases as Tools of Integration

Bibliographic databases offer an opportunity for integrated access and cross- searching of multiple digital repositories

Bibliographic databases provide links to full-text resources

Limitations

Time lags in coverage of resourcesTime-lag in providing links to full-text resourcesLack “browse” facilitysubject-specific coverageProblems of “Appropriate copy (full text)”

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Integrated Search

Interface

E-Books

Databases

Full text resources

Library services

Web pages

An Integrated Search Interface for All Resources

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Technologies and Solution for Cross Searching of Digital Repositories

Metadata harvesting approach

The bibliographic data is harvested which is used for building advanced services without relying on real-time interactive access to the remote digital repositories.

Web search engines are based on harvesting and keyword searching.

Open Archives Initiatives (OAI)

The JCCC and J-Gate also use metadata-harvesting approach

Keyword searching works well for the heterogeneous unstructured data sources. However, it fails to exploit the benefits of structured metadata that most full-text resources and bibliographic databases offer

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Technologies and Solution for Cross Searching of Digital Repositories

Cross-searching of multiple heterogeneous digital repositories

Distributed searching approach

Provides direct, real-time access to information sources on the web without resorting to crawling or replicating or harvesting metadata;

While hosting and crawling large quantities of data are expensive, difficult and frequently incomplete, distributed searching approach provides direct, real-time access to digital repositories on the web without crawling or replicating data.

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Technologies and Solution for Cross Searching of Digital Repositories

A number of commercial products and services are now available that offer cross-searching and linking possibilities based on distributed searching. Some of the important ones are:

 

Virtual Document eXchange (VDX) (http://www.fdusa.com/products/vdx.html)

Metalib and SFX (Ex-Libris, based Open URL Technology)

WebExpress / iPort (OCLIC)

Digbib (North Rhine Westphalia and Axion)

MALIBU

Endeavour (Elsevier Science)

Science Server (http://www.scienceserver.com/)

Webfeat (www.webfeat.com)

IWA Portal RevCom (ww.iwapps.com)

Intelliseek

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ConclusionConsortia Should Work Together

for same resources; Benefit of number; andConsortium extend should be large enough to attract publishers;

Increased cooperation, coordination and collaboration amongst beneficiary institutions and Government agencies;

Increased inter-institutional cooperation including inter-library loan;

Involvement of end-users in selection of e-resources;

Providing e-resources to Scientists in not a goal in-itself;

The goal is to increase productivity of scientific and research output both in quantity and quality; and

Trigger stronger research and academic culture in member institutions.

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Conclusion

Digital Library is a collaborative enterprise

“War is too important a matter to be left to the generals.”

Georges Clemenceau

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