UL and the ‘shift to the digital’ ESS team and work Resource Discovery service COMET – Cambridge Open METadata
One of six legal deposit libraries 6.5 + million items 1 major site 4 ‘dependent libraries’ ‘Mausoleum of dusty old books for the humanities’ Wider group of college and departmental libraries
Aprx. 40% of UL & dependents materials budget now spent on online resources (ejournals, database subscriptions) Majority of this on STEM publications Reliance on subscription content housed on publishers websites
Legal deposit electronic intake to start in next year Publishers can submit electronic versions of material for legal deposit to the legal deposit agency Initially voluntary for periodicals only Dependent on law being passed
Digitising special collections for some time with external funding No Google books project Planning for a unified digital library DSpace
New skills base in staff – technically savvy or at least unafraid - focus on front end reader services rather than back end cataloguers - Changes in buildings Changes in services Changes in approach
30+ staff in the UL Lead by Patricia Killiard Mix of skills and backgrounds - (Librarians, I.T. Officers, Developers, Early Career Researchers ...)
Support day-to-day library operations across Cambridge through the Library Management System for Cambridge (Voyager) (buying, cataloguing, circulating, stock management + reporting) End user support for all the above, UL + 70 or so other libraries PC and network support for 300+ UL staff
Website development and support for UL and others Support subscription online resources (licensed ejournals, ebooks online databases and datasets) and systems to manage acquisition and delivery Digitisation of special collections (wider digital library service on its way …) DSpace (Library side) and surrounding projects
Went to tender (full EU): Open source options look promising now, but not there at the time We wanted to move quickly Reached decision by June 2009
Five months of contract negotiation – signed in October 2009 Hardware purchased December 2009 Software installed January 2010 Live by August 2010
Aquabrowser – used by Harvard, Edinburgh, York, Chicago, National Libraries of Wales and Scotland Scalable, proven Minimal hardware requirements Relatively user friendly Affordable
Newer look … note the facet restriction here as well to ebook only results …
Voyager / Newton catalogues (about 6 million bibliographic records) Most of Dspace (harvested as Dublin Core) ‘ Just in time’ search of article databases
Web interface: search.lib.cam.ac.uk Branded as LibrarySearch for Cambridge XML API (rest-like) produces Marc21-XML and Dublin Core data: www.lib.cam.ac.uk/api
Historical nature of Cambridge bibliographic records No policy of centralised cataloguing in Cambridge Lots of duplicate records across Cambridge libraries ID centric de-duplication – works up to a point
Cannot replace totally Newton Not the original intention Place for multiplicity of interfaces Shift focus of marketing and development to LibrarySearch Probably stick with this name even if the search platform changes
Peter Murray-Rust and the JISC Open Bibliography Project JISC followed this up with a general call for ‘Infrastructure for Resource Discovery’
Releasing large subset of UL records under a Public Domain Data License Identifying IPR history of our bibliographic data Documenting process and releasing tools for others to do the same Some as Marc21 Converting to useful linked RDF Establishing a triplestore for the library
Part of a larger bid across the UK to open up data to provide data for national level discovery options See what developers can do with our stuff Gain in-house understanding of semantic web Better realise value in records through contribution to the public domain
Legal ownership of bibliographic data Large chunks of records from cataloguing collectives – reuse as RDF under public domain license not necessarily covered OCLC – the major record provider are partners on the project
RDF vocabs – no accepted practice for bibliographic material Marc21 does not translate well Triplestores – relative immaturity of software URI construction – needs to done in a sensible extensible fashion
Eventually hope that we could provide all our metadata in this way Joint effort with Caret – parallel project at the Fitzwilliam Triplestore at data.lib.cam.ac.uk Drawing on external developments – no modelling of data – use existing vocabs and URI guidelines Project blogspot: http://cul-comet.blogspot.com/