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Networked Services Project
Request for Tender for NLA Networked Services

Chapter 1 - Project Overview & Objectives

1.1 Introduction
1.2 Strategic Directions
1.3 Business Directions
1.4 Current Services
1.5 Need to Redevelop Current Services
1.6 Customer Focus
1.7 Project Objectives
1.8 Proposed Systems Architecture and Related Capabilities

1.1 Introduction

In December 1996, the National Library of Australia (hereafter referred to as 'the Library') terminated its National Document and Information Service (NDIS) project, being developed with the National Library of New Zealand. The NDIS project, which was the subject of an RFT in October, 1993, was seen as a major task involving considerable systems development.

The Library is aware of considerable developments in the library and information services marketplace since 1993, in part fuelled by the massive growth in the use of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Library has therefore determined to base its future computer-based information services, in support of its strategic directions, on products and services available in the marketplace. The redevelopment of the Library's networked services is aimed to minimise future systems development and operations costs, based on a development path which is sufficiently flexible to take advantage of marketplace developments.

The Library will redevelop its networked services in specific modules in the short to medium term, within an overall architecture and functionality set consistent with its business directions. This will involve separate procurement processes. Stage 1 of this Project seeks to replace the current functions supported by the Australian Bibliographic Network. The Library intends to commence implementation before the end of 1997.

1.2 Strategic Directions

The Library's strategic directions recognise the trends towards an increasingly technologically based and information conscious society, the increasing amounts of information stored in electronic form which can be delivered directly to people's desktops, and the rapid developments in telecommunications and Internet usage. The Library also recognises the pressing need for Australian libraries to operate with increasing efficiency and to cooperate in collection development and document supply.

A key objective for the Library is ensuring the most efficient process for Australians to access recorded knowledge, whether in print, electronic or multimedia formats. This is achieved by supporting the whole document supply cycle, from the creation of data to the search for and delivery of required information products. The Library's networked services are aimed at assisting Australian libraries and individuals to obtain documents when available local resources need to be supplemented. In this way, individuals will be able to access national and international documentary sources for research, study, business or recreational purposes.

The high level strategies relevant to and supported by this project in all its stages are to:

a) Support Australian libraries and their users by providing infrastructure through which library and information resources in Australia can be identified, located and accessed
b) Support cooperative collection development in Australian libraries by maintaining a national union catalogue of resources held in Australian libraries
c) Promote the use of tools to describe libraries' collecting strengths and intentions (eg Conspectus)
d) Take advantage of the increasing amount of information available in electronic form by facilitating electronic document access and delivery
e) Improve the infrastructure supporting interlibrary lending and document delivery to Australian libraries and their users
f) Extend online services to a wide range of users, either directly or through services for other libraries and networks
g) Maximise access to the Library's own databases and collections, including those parts of the collections which are in digital form, including text, images, sound and multimedia objects
h) Improve the efficiency with which the Library's own collections are acquired, catalogued, stored and made available for use. [Note : This aim is regarded as secondary for the purposes of this project, and the Library will only accept tenders offering standard acquisition/cataloguing/serial control/circulation functions if these are extensions of functionality relating to a National Bibliographic Utility.]

1.3 Business Directions

The Library is the only organisation currently capable of enabling people to identify and locate documents in Australian libraries, and then to facilitate the supply of those documents, on a nation-wide basis. This is achieved chiefly through ABN services. In the short term, the Library's business directions for its networked services are heavily influenced by its current services, many of which are fee-for-service, and its extensive existing base of customer libraries and other information intermediaries (hereafter called 'Customer Libraries'). Because of the termination of the NDIS development, there is now some urgency for the Library to establish a new development path to provide replacement systems for its Customer Libraries.

Over the medium-term and in line with market developments and Australian government policies and initiatives, the Library expects to be able to reach directly many more individual customers (hereafter called End Users) as Internet access becomes available in more homes, businesses and community points of access. The Library is therefore developing a range of electronic content relating to Australia and Australians which will underpin services for a broader market in future.

1.4 Current Services

The Library's current networked services (described in detail in Appendix A) are primarily aimed at Australian libraries. They include the fee-for-service offerings listed below.

a) Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN). This is a shared cataloguing and document supply service implemented in 1981 by the Library. ABN currently has approximately 1,400 Customer Libraries, including almost all significant libraries in Australia. It is therefore a truly national bibliographic utility service. ABN Customer Libraries use the services for a range of activities including information retrieval, document requesting, original and copy cataloguing and as a source of catalogue products, most importantly MARC records. ABN operates on the WAN software initially developed by the Western Library Network in the late 1970's. ABN also provides an information retrieval service through duplication of its indexes using the STAIRS software.
b) Underpinning the ABN services is a very large database, the 'National Bibliographic Database' (NBD) consisting of MARC records compiled by several national libraries throughout the world (eg, USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand) and contributed by Customer Libraries. Currently the NBD contains more than 12 million bibliographic records (describing documents) and 25 million holdings records (providing locations in Australian libraries).
c) ABN also provides an inter-library loan (ILL) sub-system which enables Customer Libraries to make document requests through the network, to track progress of the requests, and reconcile charges between libraries for the supply of documents requested. The ABN ILL system currently accounts for approximately 30% of the total interlibrary loan requests made by Australian libraries.
d) Ozline. This is a citation and full-text database hosting service covering Australian-related documents, hosted by the Library since 1987. Ozline currently has 33 databases, covering the social sciences, humanities, and science and technology. Negotiations are under way to add a number of new databases to the Ozline service. Ozline databases are searched via the IBM STAIRS information retrieval language.
e) Australasian Medical Index (AMI). This is a citation database service offered as a part of the Ozline service; however, it is searched using the US National Library of Medicine's Medline retrieval language. A number of medical practitioners are End User subscribers to AMI, as well as Customer Libraries.
f) The National Chinese Japanese Korean Service (NCJKS), which provides full cataloguing support facilities for materials written in the Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese and Korean scripts, together with transliteration capabilities. The Library is planning to add similar facilities for the Thai script. The NCJKS operates on software developed by Innovative Interfaces Inc., supporting a variety of client software. Cross-updating of databases will shortly take place between the ABN and NCJKS systems to support ILL via ABN and to add transliterated records to the NBD.
g) The Library has also formed strategic alliances with a number of US-based services. Through these alliances the Library is able to offer Australian libraries reduced rates for selected services at CARL UnCover, the Research Libraries Group RLIN, OCLC and Medline. Access to these services is directly via the Internet or via the Library's Internet gateway, which is a menu item on the Library's main networked services menu.

The Library also provides an extensive range of free services through its World Wide Web Server (available for viewing at http://www.nla.gov.au/). These include:

a) The National Library catalogue, which contains approximately 2.2 million bibliographic records and is maintained in the OPAC module of the Dynix Integrated Library System which supports the Library's collection management activities
b) More than 200 'finding lists' (in a variety of formats) of items in manuscript and other collections
c) The 'Images 1' database of more than 13,000 images of works in the pictorial collection
d) About 4,800 full-text documents relating to the Library's policies, collections and services.

1.5 Need to Redevelop Current Services

The Library wishes to move from the existing systems environment for its bibliographic utility and database hosting services because:

a) The costs of maintaining the software beyond 1999 are prohibitive
b) The existing software is old, complex and does not conform to modern standards, giving rise to a range of data handling problems
c) Software development is slow and costly compared with systems written with more modern languages and development tools
d) The systems environment does not offer user interfaces which meet current market expectations of either novices or professional intermediaries
e) The system cannot easily be integrated with other Library services to provide a modern enterprise document and data serving capability
f) There is a need for more efficient data loading and management
g) The current system cannot extend effectively to the management of full-text and multimedia
h) There is a need to adapt to and work with increasingly sophisticated local systems in Australian libraries.

1.6 Customer Focus

The Library intends to continue as the leading provider in the Australian and wider marketplace of :

a) General information relating to Australia and Australians, in support of study, research, scholarship and the development of the nation, and as a major national heritage repository
b) Services to Australian libraries and similar information providers which support their efficient operation and enhance their ability to obtain documents on demand to meet their End Users' requirements.

Major customer groups targeted for future networked services are listed below.

a) Libraries and information providers, particularly:
i. Cataloguing and other data creation and administration staff
ii. Staff providing information to clients
iii. Document delivery staff
iv. Library administrators.
Future services will build on existing strong cooperative relationships with the Australian library community developed by the Library through its current ABN/Ozline and other networked services, and in particular with the heaviest users of those services, mostly large research libraries, through the migration of these existing customers to replacement services for ABN and Ozline.
Overseas libraries which are already ABN/Ozline customers will be migrated to the new services and further overseas libraries may be secondary markets in the future.
b) Researchers, particularly academics, postgraduate students, policy makers, creative writers, genealogists, health professionals and lawyers.
Those End Users who are already ABN/Ozline customers will be migrated to new services, and new End Users will be targeted following the implementation stages.
c) School libraries, which are not a major user of current services, may be attracted to some services if an acceptable combination of pricing structure and targeted services is offered.

1.7 Project Objectives

1.7.1 Overall Capabilities Sought (All Stages)

The Library is seeking proposals for the supply of products and/or services in support of the achievement of its strategic and business directions. The Library needs to provide, and itself have access to, the following capabilities:

a) Providing searching services which meet the needs of different user groups, ranging from the casual End User to the professional information intermediary
b) Creating, maintaining and providing online access to a national bibliographic database, with accompanying location data describing where documents are held. This database must have a bibliographic utility function, allowing Customer Libraries to add, amend or delete cataloguing and holdings data from this database as required, and to obtain copies of bibliographic (MARC) records for insertion into their catalogues
c) Facilitating the order and supply of copies and loans of documents (whether in physical or electronic forms) between the Library, Customer Libraries, information providers and End Users, offering copyright management facilities where appropriate
d) Creating, hosting and providing online access to databases (primarily Australian) which index documents and/or contain complete documents in electronic form (full text, multimedia and images).

These requirements include those currently supported by the Library's current services, the Australian Bibliographic Network and Ozline, together with textual information and image services currently provided through the Library's World Wide Web Server.

1.7.2 Scope of Stage 1

The Library regards the redevelopment of the Australian Bibliographic Network's cataloguing and interlibrary lending functions as critical to the needs of its Customer Libraries and central to its networked services. Therefore, this tender seeks proposals for parts (a) and (b) of Section 1.7.1, Overall Capabilities Sought. Additionally, those aspects of part (c) which are delivered by the National Bibliographic Utility are included. Proposals for other capabilities sought by the Library for its networked services will be the subject of future stages of this Project.

Tenderers should note that the Library expects to provide search and retrieval End User interfaces which are consistent across all networked data and document services.

1.7.3 Development Philosophy

A major goal of this project is to facilitate nationwide access to documents of all types held by libraries and other information providers in Australia. In replacing ABN and Ozline, the Library intends to:

a) Base the Networked Services on products and services available or currently becoming available in the marketplace
b) Adopt a modular 'mix and match' architecture which provides a clear separation between servers, underlying databases, communication infrastructures and clients. This approach is intended to allow ease of future system or sub-system replacement and modification as required to meet business needs, and take advantage of marketplace developments
c) Utilise and support standards which have broad marketplace and industry support to integrate individual products and services to achieve the overall capabilities sought by the Networked Services Project (Section 5.9)
d) Minimise software development as far as possible
e) Minimise the Library's involvement in the distribution of client software
f) Utilise Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to link software products to achieve the capabilities sought, where standards are not yet available or implemented
g) Provide services that contribute to the more integrated use of the distributed library databases and services in Australia by:
i. providing interfaces between databases and systems which improve the overall efficiency of the systems of document identification, ordering and supply (Section 4.4)
ii. providing transparent access to data and documents which may be stored on hosts other than those maintained by the Library, for example to a digital object on a remote server via a record in the National Bibliographic Database
iii. providing support for a more distributed national system of database hosting
iv. using the World Wide Web as the common access method for users.

1.7.4 Linkages

A possible logical architecture for the Library's Networked Services is shown in Figure 1.1. This reflects the Library's current thinking and understanding, but may be subject to further evolution during the timeframe of this Project.

In order to achieve the improvements in document access and supply needed by its customers, the Library considers that effective linkages between various service elements are required. For example, an End User searching a citation database could follow links to the full text of a desired document, or to the National Bibliographic Database to find where the serial containing the article is held and request document supply from another library. Some of these actions will need to be accompanied by payment for service and/or management of copyright.

The Library considers that major functions of any bibliographic and document management system are to enable staff in Customer Libraries and End Users to:

a) Identify potentially useful documents
b) Receive sufficient information to decide that some potentially useful documents are not required for their purpose
c) Locate and obtain required documents as quickly, conveniently and cheaply as possible.

The Library considers that if this is to occur in an environment in which catalogues, indexes, locator services and documents (and the systems managing them) are widely distributed and varied, then the functions of search, identify, locate, request and supply may be decoupled. However, these functions must be capable of working together as seamlessly as possible, using standards-based approaches to facilitate the necessary linkages between functions.

The Library will favour products or services which are provided in a way that facilitates desirable links with other products or services providing complementary functionality. Details of minimum linkages between the functionality sought in each Configuration are specified in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 where appropriate, and a statement on some technical issues relating to linkages appears in Chapter 5. However, the Library does not wish to limit the types of linkage which may be proposed.

1.7.5 Language Support

It is not a requirement that configurations tendered should support scripts other than Roman although diacritic support must be provided. The Library currently provides some networked services supporting Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts, via the National Chinese Japanese Korean Service. It also has customer demand to extend these capabilities to other scripts such as Thai, Arabic and Greek. While multi-script support is not a requirement of this Project, it is an issue which will influence future development of the Library's networked services, and will have a minor role in the evaluation of tenders.

The Library considers that in the medium-term many systems will provide multi-script database support based on Unicode and is aware that some Tenderers are able to provide functions supporting a range of scripts, or are planning to do so. Tenderers should clearly describe the scripts supported and the standards approach taken.

The Library is also aware of several developments aimed at providing multi-lingual interfacing capabilities in Clients. While this is not a priority for the Library, Tenderers of some Configurations may wish to include such functionality.

1.8 Proposed Systems Architecture and Related Capabilities

1.8.1 Introduction

This Section provides information on the Library's current view of the way the components of its developing Networked Services might fit together logically. The architectures show the envisaged inter-relationships between the various functional capabilities. However, the Library accepts that other architectures achieving the same range of capabilities can be envisaged.

1.8.2 Proposed New Environment: Key Differentiators

Linkages are a key feature of the proposed new Networked Services environment. Some of the linkages envisaged include those described below.

1.8.2.1 Citation and Bibliographic Information

The Library's concept for the future is to provide an interlinked search facility that will enable a single query to fetch results from any or all of the database servers in combinations selected by staff in Customer Libraries and End Users (eg the National Bibliographic Database and other hosted databases) irrespective of the internal search facility employed within any of these individual services.

The Library also envisages staff in Customer Libraries and End Users navigating from a citation record to associated bibliographic and location records, through to appropriate interlending and document request mechanisms, which would thus form a unified service from the point of view of both sets of users.

1.8.2.2 Linkages with Internet Based Information

Citation and bibliographic search services might also be linked with any external Internet based search services to which the Library may wish to provide access.

The Library is about to undertake a review of its World Wide Web Server environment. Areas for consideration include:

a) Options for hosting outsourced home pages on behalf of other specific information agencies
b) Providing distributed search and resource discovery services to these information agencies on the basis of managed and distributed metadata
c) Providing an HTTP/Z39.50 Gateway service.

1.8.2.3 Broadened Scope for Hosted Database Serving: Full Text and Images

The Library envisages cross-database searching where, for a given user query, the target databases are chosen by the system through informed decision-making on the basis of metadata relating to these databases.

The metadata in this instance would include content description of target databases and a weighted profile of search terms against the databases to assist in the selection of the target destinations. In addition, the metadata would also need to include the query and result syntaxes of the search engines associated with the target databases, together with any search engine relevance ranking algorithms, so that the retrieval sets may be merged and ranked as a unified result set.

While basic cross-database searching can be implemented on pre-determined databases, this approach does not scale upwards because exhaustive database searching becomes inefficient as the number of databases increases. An intervening layer of metadata would provide more focussed searching, thus narrowing down retrieval to a more meaningful subset.

It is intended to apply this metadata based searching model to both locally held databases and to distributed databases. The actual storage of metadata may need to be designed differently in each case for optimum performance and manageability.

1.8.2.4 Addressing Different User Skills for Information Searching

A key capability sought is to provide a range of search strategies to suit different categories and skills of users. The Library believes there is a need to provide for high precision, focussed searches on nominated databases for professional search intermediaries, as well as open searches for wider recall from a range of information sources. A given set of information sources needs to be accessible by either strategy.

1.8.2.5 Enhanced Information Server Environment: Resource Discovery Services

The Library is interested in adopting a national facilitating role in the development of searching mechanisms for distributed Internet information. One possibility is to build a system-assisted search model using a three-tier architecture, where:

a) An Agency Tier, ie the information provider tier, publishes resources and resource descriptions
b) A User Tier accesses and presents information through appropriate search strategies
c) A Middleware Tier mediates between the other two tiers, performing resource discovery functions through appropriate metadata and directories on target information sources. Based on the resource discovery function, the Middleware routes user queries and processes the results and merges them into a single unified result set.

The Library envisages a Middleware Tier which collects, manages and utilises metadata, which will become a key component in this activity. The Library realises that this is a new and developing area and that commercially available products may not be fully developed.

1.8.3 Overall Architecture

The overall architecture of the proposed new environment (Section 1.8) is shown below in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.2 depicts a logical architecture of the overall business requirements in terms of functional modules.

FIGURE 1.1 -Possible Systems Architecture - Logical Model

[Possible Systems Architect
ure - Logical model]

1.8.3.1 Notes on Logical Architecture

a) It is assumed that at the current state of technology End-User searching will be done from Web based clients and will therefore be platform independent, while update clients such as the Cataloguing Client (Box 9) are more likely to be proprietary PC based products.
b) The ILMS (Box 6) may be a separate physical implementation, but may alternatively be a logical view derived from the NBD and location data, as with some currently implemented systems.
c) The current Library Information Server has two functions: an entry point function and a document serving function. In the above logical architecture, these two functions have been placed in the HTTP/Z39.50 Gateway (Box 11) and the Database Hosting System (Boxes 4 and 5) respectively.
d) It is envisaged that the Database Hosting System may be implemented as a bundled proprietary solution, complete with its own database management system and/or search engine, but may alternatively be implemented in an unbundled fashion, with the data serving being a separate component from the indexing/searching component.
e) A search request through the HTTP/Z39.50 Gateway can be directed to three target data groups - the NBU (Box 7), Citation and other Hosted Databases (Boxes 4 & 5), and external Internet sources (Box 14) - either directly, or through the Metadata Server (Box 8) in case of substantial cross-database searches.
f) The Library is aware that some of the above areas represent relatively recent developments, eg the Metadata Server area, and therefore may not yet have readily available commercial strength products.
FIGURE 1.2 - A Physical Model of the Architecture in Terms of Expected Products in the Marketplace

[Possible Systems Architect
ure - Logical model]


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