Staff Paper
Australian Subject Gateways Forum: How the Australian Subject Gateways Contribute to Internet Use in Learning, Education and Training
A paper presented by Barbara Rozmus, Manager, National Initiatives, National Library of Australia, at the Global Summit of Online Knowledge Networks, held in Adelaide, South Australia, 4-5 March, 2002.
Abstract:
The emergence of a subject gateway as an Internet service has resulted largely from a reaction of information professionals to the poor performance of search tools on the web. Most search engines index only fraction of the web resources. Despite the ongoing development and increasing sophistication of some of the popular search engines they are still not reliable in finding relevant items quickly. Subject gateways address this issue by providing a mechanism for accessing a collection of high quality, evaluated resources identified to support research in a particular subject discipline. The resources identified typically include websites, e-journals, and databases. Therefore subject gateways can provide a substantial contribution to supporting learning and teaching in the new online environment.
The Australian Subject Gateways Forum (ASGF) http://www.nla.gov.au/subjectgateways/, formed in February 2000, brought together the subject gateways in Australia. They evolved predominantly within the Australian Higher Education sector. The aims of the ASGF include facilitating an information exchange between new and existing gateway projects and identifying common issues needing to be addressed. The ASGF include subject-specific gateways (such as agriculture, engineering, sustainable development, chemistry, education and preservation of digital resources) and non-subject specific gateways. The gateways currently under development cover the areas of Australian literature, performing arts, trade union history and law. The primary target audience for the ASGF subject gateways are under- and post-graduate students and lecturers in the HE sector, as well as professionals and researchers in the field.
What all the ASGF subject gateways have in common is the application of standard policies and procedures to ensure effective resource discovery. Only high-quality web resources are included selected by subject specialists who apply defined selection criteria, described and classified by information specialists who use a recognised metadata schema and an appropriate controlled vocabulary. As a result, the resource discovery process for a user is likely to be effective. In this way subject gateways offer a unique capacity to support innovative learning and teaching and are exemplary in demonstrating best practice in online resource description.
Australian Subject Gateways Forum: how the Australian subject gateways contribute to Internet use in learning, education and training
What is a subject gateway?
The emergence of a subject gateway as an Internet service resulted from a reaction of information professionals to the poor performance of search tools on the Web. As is widely known, most search engines index only a fraction of total Internet resources. Despite the ongoing development and increasing sophistication of some of the popular search engines they are still not reliable for finding relevant items quickly.
So what is a subject gateway and what are some of its key features? According to one authoritative source, a subject gateway is a Web site that provides searchable and browsable access to online resources focused around a specific subject.[1] It provides a resource discovery mechanism for accessing a collection of high quality, evaluated resources identified to support research in a particular subject discipline.[2] The resources are evaluated and described by information specialists in the field, for example science librarians or educationalists, and are often made freely available via the World Wide Web.
Some subject gateways also offer access to print resources. The issue of provision of integrated access and access to resources which are not freely available online has been debated in Australia in the last few years.
Subject gateways in Australia
Subject gateways originated in the UK university sector in the mid-nineties, with Australia following in the late-nineties. With one exception all have been set up as collaborative projects under Australia Research Council grants. There are also some subject gateways operated by government departments[3], however they are outside the scope of this paper.
The target user group for the subject gateways are predominantly students and researchers in the Australian Higher Education sector. Some subject gateways also target professionals in the field, government departments, public libraries and school students as their secondary users.
The Australian Higher Education sector has four established subject-specific gateways at present:
- Agrigate http://www.agrigate.edu.au/, a gateway to Australian agricultural resources;
- MetaChem http://metachem.ch.adfa.edu.au/, which is devoted to the subject of chemistry;
- AVEL: Australasian Virtual Engineering Library http://avel.edu.au/, contains resources specific to engineering and information technology; and
- AustLit: The Australian Literature Gateway http://www.austlit.edu.au/
The lead institution in each of these gateway projects has been a university, with a number of other universities as partners.
In addition to the Higher Education based services, the National Library hosts a gateway called PADI: Preserving Access to Digital Information http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/.
Other gateway projects funded by the Australian Research Council within the last two years include: Weblaw http://www.weblaw.edu.au/ (for Australian secondary legal material), Ausstage (for performing arts), and Australian Trade Union Heritage Resources Gateway. All are currently under development.
Gateways not confined to a single discipline also exist in Australia. One example is the Education Network Australias EdNA Online http://www.edna.edu.au/index.html service, for teachers and learners in the school, vocational and higher education sectors. EdNA Online is funded jointly by all state, territory and commonwealth ministers for Education. Another example is PictureAustralia http://www.pictureaustralia.org/, hosted by the National Library, which is a gateway to digital image collections of a number of cultural agencies totalling over 500 000 images.
The Australian Digital Theses Program http://adt.caul.edu.au/ also uses a gateway-style architecture. It began as a project with seven universities as partners. At present it is available to all Australian universities for electronic submission and archiving of theses and dissertations.
Australian Subject Gateways Forum (ASGF) and its role
The Australian Subject Gateways Forum (ASGF) was established in February 2000 in response to the need for a cooperative approach to providing access to high-quality educational Web content. The Forum has brought together the existing and evolving subject gateways in Australia. The issues of duplication of effort, best practice, common standards and sustainability have been high on the agenda of the ASGF. The collaboration has been facilitated by holding regular 6-monthly meetings, and also establishing an ASGF website at http://www.nla.gov.au/subjectgateways/, hosted by the National Library of Australia (NLA).
How the ASGF subject gateways contribute to Internet use in learning, education and training
The ASGF subject gateways are being hosted by trusted information providers, mostly university libraries, with other appropriate partners sometimes also involved (for example the Institution of Engineers in the case of AVEL). The gateways are managed by information specialists who have experience in high quality information selection and description. They apply a number of strategies to ensure that the service provided is of high quality:
- the number of resources is kept to a qualitative minimum, through using a rigorous pre-agreed scope and selection policies (usually made public through their Web sites);
- effective resource discovery is enabled by use of subject-specific thesauri in assigning subject headings; and
- utilisation of one, or a combination of a number of standard metadata schemas ensures interoperability with other systems.
The issue of metadata may warrant an additional comment here, as in fact the application of metadata has been the single common denominator effecting the provision of service by subject gateways. A simple definition of metadata is " a summary of information about the form and content of a resource"[4]. Metadata, albeit a new word for an old concept, is an essential tool for enabling effective resource discovery on the Web. Most ASGF gateways have chosen Dublin Core as the base schema and augmented it with some AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service) elements and a number of local metadata elements. Other metadata schemas have been applied to support rights management and managing the metadata itself.[5]
Some examples of the services and resources offered by the ASGF gateways are:
- AVEL: Australasian Virtual Engineering Library http://avel.edu.au/
The AVEL gateway provides user-friendly access to quality IT, engineering and sustainable development Web-based resources, and at present contains over 4,000 records. Originally conceived as a searchable, browsable database of high quality resources it has continued to change and add services in response to the evolving needs of its target audience. The target audience for AVEL is diverse and includes university researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers in the R&D departments of Australian companies and Australian government departments, as well as engineering and IT professionals working in industry.
- AustLit Gateway: Australian Literature Gateway http://www.austlit.edu.au/
Austlit provides access to bibliographical records on almost 400,000 Australian creative and critical works in both print and electronic formats, and to biographical and organisational information on more than 60,000 Australian authors and literary organisations. The gateway was formed by a consortium of eight universities and the National Library. Having incorporated records from a number of previously existing databases, it aims to provide Australian students and researchers with a single access point for their Australian literature needs. AustLit was made available for free trial October 2001-January 2002 and is now available on a subscription basis in the interests of long-term sustainability.
The AustLit gateway is the first large scale implementation of IFLA's FRBR model[6], and is an early adopter of INDECS[7] and Topic Maps[8]. This framework enables it to draw rich relationships between a whole range of entities such as authors, organizations, works, places, times, subjects, settings and publishers.
One of AustLits goals for the next 2-3 years is to exploit the capacity of this powerful set of research resources for a range of tertiary needs, including integration with flexible learning services such as student portals and distance education programs.[9]
- Agrigate http://www.agrigate.edu.au/
AGRIGATE is a subject information gateway for resources, both online and offline, identified as valuable to those participating in Australian agriculture research. The resources are selected by an editorial review process consisting of specialist librarians and members of the agriculture research community and include websites, databases and other electronically available information sources, as well as some non-electronic materials. The purpose of Agrigate is to support identification and dissemination of high quality research materials.
- Metachem http://metachem.ch.adfa.edu.au/
MetaChem is a single Web-based focal point for access to chemistry information resources of all kinds. The gateway provides access to Internet information such as electronic chemistry publications and databases, research projects, data sources, software, online teaching modules, directories, conferences etc. In addition, the gateway provides links, through library catalogues and document delivery services, to print information. This project brings together chemists, information systems specialists and librarians in order to enhance the retrieval of information.
Evaluation and usage issues
One of the topics the ASGF members are keen to exchange information on is the area of usability studies, involving usability testing, user satisfaction surveys and performance measurements[10]. As a result of such work the gateways continue improving their user interface, as well as both the range and functionality of their services. At present most ASGF gateways are responding to changing user expectations by working towards increasing the number of full-text documents offered, and delivering associated contextual information. This will certainly result in enriching the learning experience of users. A number of the ASGF gateways are in the process of exploring mechanisms for offering full-text access to higher degree theses in collaboration with the Australian Digital Theses Program http://adt.caul.edu.au/.
Consideration of interoperability issues by the ASGF
A major challenge needing to be addressed is interoperability between the gateway services. The ASGF has been looking at this issue, in particular at resource sharing
in three areas:
- human resources
Given their long history of expertise in information provision, libraries and librarians are already positioned to attempt the integration of new initiatives with existing services. This has been successful in a number of the gateways projects.
- financial resources
The development of business models for the sustainability of electronic information services is a crucial issue for all gateway service providers. The gateways share their work in this area.
- exchanging content
The gateways are well placed to undertake content exchange as they use common metadata schemas. Some initiatives to progress this issue are now under consideration by the ASGF members. AustLit currently interoperates with the National Bibliographic Database to allow users to locate library holdings information on books and journals, the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts and the Guide to Australian Literary Manuscripts, to allow users to discover the location and content of archival collections, and PictureAustralia to add the human face to its description of authors.
International collaboration
As the issues faced by the ASGF members are not unique to Australia, the group has initiated a number of collaborations to share their experiences with information providers overseas:
- The Australian gateway providers were invited to assist in the evaluation of the IMesh toolkit project http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/, a joint initiative funded by the UKs Joint Information Steering Committee and the US National Science Foundation. The goal of the IMesh toolkit is delivery of a configurable, reusable and extensible metadata-based toolkit for gateway providers.
- The ASGF is an associated partner of the UK-based Resource Discovery Network Centre http://www.rdn.ac.uk/. The Centre provides guidance and umbrella services in the area of business plans, marketing strategies, and intellectual property rights management to the UK subject gateways providing services to end user through the Resource Discovery Network. The National Library of Australia has been working with the RDN Centre to tackle some of these issues together, and to explore the possibility of sharing content.
- The ASGF has shared their experiences with a European project called Renardus http://www.renardus.org/, which aims to establish an academic subject gateway service in Europe. Renardus involves the National Libraries of the Netherlands, France and Germany, and University & Technical Centres in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and the UK. A pilot has been developed to test integrated searching and browsing of distributed resource collections. The ASGF members helped evaluate the pilot service.
Conclusion
The national and international collaboration of the subject gateways providers in Australia has helped them deliver quality information services to learners and researchers. Rigorous application of standard policies and procedures is common to all ASGF gateways. As a result only high-quality web resources are included selected by subject specialists who apply defined selection criteria, described and classified by information specialists who use a recognised metadata schema and an appropriate controlled vocabulary. Providing such an information environment ensures that user access to resources is guided in a most professional way and is highly likely to result in effective resource discovery by the user.
The Australian subject gateways are exemplary in demonstrating best practice in online resource description and user-oriented service delivery. They offer a unique capacity to support innovative learning and teaching in the 21st century.
[1] Australian Subject Gateways, National Library of Australia 2001. Definitions for Web-based services. Available at http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sg/servicetypes.html#sgateway
[2] ibid
[3] For a combined listing of the Australian subject gateways see the Meta Matters website at http://www.nla.gov.au/meta/sg/gateways.html
[4] Meta Matters website. National Library of Australia 2001. Available at http://www.nla.gov.au/meta/intro.html
[5] For more details on this see Metadata Comparison for Subject Gateways Involved in the Australian Subject Gateways Forum at http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sg/metadata.html
[6] See: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records - Final Report. Available at http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr1.htm
[7] See: <indecs> Framework Ltd website. Available at http://www.indecs.org/
[8] See: International Organisation for Standardization, ISO/IEC FCD 13250:1999 - Topic Maps. Available at http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0058.htm
[9] Marie-Louise Ayres, AustLit: a Gateway on Steroids, Computing Arts 2001 Conference Papers. Available at http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/drrh2001/papers/ayres.pdf
[10] Australian Subject Gateways, Australian Subject Gateways Forum: Usability studies. National Library of Australia 2001. Available at http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sg/usability.html
Barbara Rozmus
Manager National Initiatives
National Library of Australia
