An article by Debbie Campbell for Online Information Review, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 73-77 published in 2000.
The key political and strategic issues which need to be addressed for the future development of the Australian subject gateways are: continued quality of content creation, integration of access to print and electronic resources, archiving and persistent identification, sustainability of services and service integration. These issues will be more effectively tackled internationally, and the Australian subject gateways are keen to work with international collaborators to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.
During 1998-99, several subject gateway projects were funded from the Australian Research Council, an independent research body supported by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs. The goal of each project was to establish a high quality source of discipline specific materials at a single Web location [1]. The selection of the disciplines in question: chemistry, agriculture, engineering & information technology, was based on historical and political factors in the Australian research library community.
The advent of the subject gateway projects has opened up a lively debate in Australia about the place of resource discovery and access services for Web resources in a national information and research environment. While a range of strategic and political issues still need to be addressed for the further development of the Australian subject gateways, this paper will focus on the following key issues: content creation, integration of access to print and electronic resources, archiving and persistent identification, sustainability and service integration.
Content creation is used here in the context of metadata as content. While Web resources themselves may also be classified as content, this discussion concentrates more on the management of their descriptive and administrative information. Metadata refers to standard descriptive schemas which have been developed for international use in the 1990s, such as the Dublin Core [2]. This paper assumes that the creation or augmentation of metadata for Web resources is a key mechanism for facilitating enhanced resource discovery and access in research disciplines.
The identification, description and provision of access to Web resources in a single discipline, sufficiently reliable and qualitative to support research, requires a high level of strategic management. A distributed creation service, where subject categories within the discipline are apportioned between partner sites, is effective only if the selection criteria and description guidelines are well understood and consistently applied. Duplicate inclusion of resources is prevented if the metadata repository is scanned first, but this currently only occurs within a single discipline gateway.
Overlaps in subject coverage, for example in gateways addressing different spectra of the sciences, are more difficult to manage. Environmental engineering resources may be included in an engineering gateway or an environmental gateway. Biological resources may be included in an agricultural or chemistry gateway. Knowledge of the coverage of different but related gateways becomes necessary. A gateway to gateways may be a starting point, in that some similarity of principles for inclusion can be assumed. But to make a reasonable assessment about the aspirations and coverage of a potentially related but dissimilar gateway requires different knowledge.
One way of strengthening a solution could be to consider liaison between other gateways in the same disciplinary sphere. Sharing of experiences, decisions, and knowledge by using the gateway itself is possible. Negotiating agreements to share metadata content, not only between gateways of similar disciplinary coverage but also where incidental overlap is possible, would benefit the quality of resource provision on a national and global scale.
This scenario may require the establishment of a coordinating agency, not only to broker agreements between gateways, but also to ensure that metadata is applied equally effectively in all gateways. A coordinating agency could also recommend new disciplinary targets where subject gateways should be established to fill gaps in the research infrastructure. Only when such a support structure is in place will a reduction in the duplication of effort be possible. Such a model has already been suggested in the United Kingdom with the establishment of the Resource Discovery Network Centre in 1999 [3]. Whether Australia should implement a formal national resource discovery network, or utilise an existing service to achieve the same goals, is an option yet to be widely discussed.
What is less clear is the relationship between an existing national bibliographic database and Web resources. While provision has been made to describe Web resources in the USMARC metadata schema used by Kinetica, Australia's National Bibliographic Database and cataloguing utility [4], they remains a very small percentage of the total content of the national repository. Various reasons may be postulated for this occurrence, such as cost of record creation and reluctance to invest in transitory resources, but new technical architectures in the information environment for distributed searching based on the Z39.50 protocol or the Bath profile [5] can be exploited to expand the combined access and delivery of Web and print materials.
The actual agreements underpinning arrangements for integrated access need to be carefully negotiated. Agreements may be many-tiered or of different types, depending on the service to be provided. However, it would seem desirable to start with simple agreements, given the current fragility of high quality Web-based services, and then build on subsequent successes.
Other mechanisms for integrating access to print and electronic resources should also be investigated. Transferral of metadata between services could be considered, although one direction may be preferable to the reverse when factors such as the volatility of the data (higher in the case of Web resources) or its granularity (higher in the case of print resources) are taken into account. The effort to synchronise duplicated metadata (albeit in different renditions) may also cause undesirable problems.
Where metadata is not to be transferred, distributed cross-gateway searching may be deployed. The levels of satisfaction in the end result for the user will highlight new issues surrounding quality and interoperability. Cross-searching will also raise the key issue of responsibility for managing the archive of both metadata as content and the resources themselves by the gateway service provider.
Archiving for preservation in an electronic environment may be described as collecting, where "collecting becomes the discovery and registration of an electronic resource and the implementation of processes to ensure that a copy is preserved for future access." (Fullerton, 1998 [6]). This in a sense is reversed for a subject gateway: discovery and (concomitant) registration of an electronic resource becomes collecting, which should result in the implementation of processes to ensure that a copy is preserved for future access. That is, the initial goal of locating resources for inclusion in a subject gateway is the identification of quality resources for inclusion, but a subsidiary goal should see the investment expended in this process reused to facilitate both persistent identification and preservation.
Longevity of Web resources is not just a funding issue, although funding will make the task easier. It is important to identify the agency most appropriate for activating the preservation processes. Many of the institutions identifying and describing Web resources in the gateways do not 'own' the resources themselves, so the onus is not primarily on them to undertake archiving responsibilities.
However, in order to create the stability required to allow a project to become a service, the lead agency and partners participating in the gateway projects clearly have a vested interest in the longevity of any given resource. They must therefore encourage the owners of the resources to take steps for preserving essential materials. This action will vary according to the type of discipline, but any citation of a resource (even expressed in bookmark form) means that it has inherent long-term value and therefore deserves preserving.
As a practical example of this requirement, some capacity should be found in the institutions which lead or host subject gateway projects to archive and continue to make accessible the documentation of the project. Allowing expertise and experience to remain available in this way will increase the return on investment made by the funding bodies as well as the investments in establishing the service made by the participating organisations.
Persistent identification is also an investment in longevity. In particular when a project site 'disappears', persistent identification can be redirected to the archived copy of the site. It is critical for subject gateways owners to act as a catalyst in these areas, in order to ensure the longevity of their own value-added services. Effort directed into these areas will also play a key role in ensuring the long-term sustainability of the subject gateways.
Australian subject gateway projects have been supported according to the quality of funding applications, including an expectation that gateways are an appropriate response to Web-based research resource provision. It has in part been serendipitous that each gateway has implemented appropriate standards to achieve the main goal of facilitated resource discovery in a particular subject discipline. However, across the applications, there has so far been no evaluation of the Australian research need for coverage in particular disciplines. In addition, no common exit strategies have been identified which would help to guarantee their long-term existence as part of a national information and research infrastructure.
When does a subject gateway established via one-off project funding become a service? In a sense, the subject gateways have already been institutionalised - the partnering institutions have provided some form of stability. But this non-contractual arrangement weakens the ability of the services to withstand cost-cutting measures which periodically strike academic institutions, and to improve the services by enhancing them in response to maturing researcher needs. The effort required to establish and sustain the gateways in short 12-month timeframes has made it difficult to focus on exit strategies which might ensure long-term viability, but some avenues have been explored. Each gateway has attracted a form of sponsorship, sometimes only exploited in one-off situations, and usually not as a part of a contractual arrangement for service delivery over a reasonable timeframe, such as five years.
The range of "sponsorship" types invoked to date is interesting to note. The following examples from existing gateways indicate the spectrum of sponsorship from endorsement to financial support. Agrigate [7] - promotion on radio to reach remote communities; AVEL [8] - a single annual contribution from Institution of Engineers Australia; BrightSparcs [9] - a combination of government grants, private funding, and niche marketing; EdNA Online [10] - fully funded by the Commonwealth and State government Departments of Education; and MetaChem [11] - endorsement from the Professorial Heads of all Departments of Chemistry in Australian universities. However, no funding or other frameworks have yet been established to sustain subject gateways as key elements of Australia's national research and information infrastructure.
The gateways collectively provide and maintain an ongoing high quality research environment for Australian researchers. This is not dissimilar to the national coordination of the purchasing of commercial datasets. Resources to coordinate the management the services could be amortised across all existing gateways. Such an approach would allow the identification of gaps in Australia's research knowledge, increase the leverage of partnerships with gateways overseas, and provide a common base from which to start investigating new functionality for the future.
Sustainability is a critical issue that needs to be addressed for the long-term development of subject gateway services. Funding will be required for enhancements to explore new value-added services, and to facilitate gateways to become portals which focus on provision of individually customised services. Collectively they can be used to test specific examples of commonly required functionality, such as e-commerce regimes or user authentication across information services. In order to stimulate discussion of this proposal, in July 1999 the National Library of Australia released a discussion paper to suggest some possible avenues for testing the scope of integrating the gateways into the existing research infrastructure [12].
The gateway project partners themselves also need to consider methods of service integration, in order to maximise the benefits of their efforts in establishing the gateways. Integration should mean enhancing and maximising the value of existing infrastructure services and combining their service delivery with new mechanisms which exploit new technologies. The Australian Digital Theses (ADT) archive [13], which may be classified as a cross-disciplinary gateway, is attempting to explore this for one particular type of resource - the electronic thesis. The ADT project has set up an electronic submission process for student theses, and a metadata-enabled search engine for cross-campus discovery and access. The project is moving to a new phase, to include all of Australia's university campuses.
Traditionally, a single paper copy of a thesis was lodged in the university library. Some of the libraries created a catalogue record, some haven't. Some campuses have also made their theses available on microfilm for nation-wide distribution. However, access may be described as patchy at best. The potential of the electronic submission and archive process will be realised in part by the ability to capture the metadata record into a catalogue record for lodging in Australia's national bibliographic database, Kinetica. The ADT project will assist in the refinement of workflow processes to achieve this outcome, and as a result, increase the integration of existing and new services. As an additional outcome, there is an incentive to improve the level of cataloguing for this important resource type.
While the subject gateways in Australia are relatively new compared to the European experience, the range of political and strategic issues generated by their efforts with provision of high quality Web resources has been very useful. The challenges to traditional ways of thinking have reinforced both the value of existing service provision methods, and permitted the exploration of new methods of service integration. This investment in shaping the national research and information infrastructure needs to continue.
However, the issues discussed in this paper are not unique to Australia. There is a need for international consensus in the development of subject gateways, in order to avoid expensive repetitive efforts to provide subject coverage in research disciplines. In addition, the gateways must sit within a broader framework of information infrastructure. They are a critical component of integrated services on a national and international scale.
Ms. Debbie Campbell
Manager, Infrastructure Projects
Coordination Support Branch
National Library of Australia
Canberra,
ACT, 2601
Australia
ph: +61 2 6262 1673
fax: +61 2 6273 2545
email:dcampbel@nla.gov.au
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