Creating a Subject Portal for Sustainable Business A Collaborative Project Between the Valley Library and Oregon State University’s College of Business Jeremy Mellinger & Frumkin Online Northwest, 2006

Collaboration

CWIS (see-wis)

Customization

Community

Collaboration Margaret

College of Business meets Valley Library KB, OSU’s University Librarian and Dean of the COB have a good relationship. During a conversation with the Dean Kleinsorge, Karyle Butcher found out about a Sustainable Business Database that COB faculty were building. There were questions and concerns about how to deliver this database over the web. Karyle recommended that the faculty contact the Libraries to discuss the issues they are having, which they did. Meetings between COB and librarians Mark Pagell (COB) contacted Margaret Mellinger to begin a conversation about the issues they were having with the database. Another exploratory meeting included Carol Brown (COB), Jeremy Frumkin, Pagell and Mellinger. Carol Brown had built an Access database

Importance of Sustainable Business ideas in the field of Business The re-emergence of sustainablilty a measure of human endeavor --- sustainable forestry, sustainable development, sustainable business practices Programs or courses in colleges of business; lecture series; books, journals emerging in the last several years What is Sustainable Business? One shorthand definition of sustainability in business is the “triple bottom line.” Bottom line refers to the statement of net profit or loss in a financial statement. The triple bottom line measures more than profitability, taking into account environmental and social performance as well as economic. Sustainable Business is also an initiative in the COB’s Strategic Plan COB’s Sustainable Business Initiative’s definition: Sustainability- A sustainable business meets the economic, social and environmental needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Image credits: College of Business Christopher G. Reuther EHP

Importance of Sustainable Business in Oregon “Brand Oregon” Oregon Natural Step Network The Oregon Natural Step Network supports organizations interested in using The Natural Step framework for sustainability. It is founded on the principle that businesses and organizations can reduce their impact on the environment while enhancing their overall efficiency and effectiveness. The Network seeks to align business and government practices with natural cycles that support the web of life. City of Oregon Office of Sustainable Development - Best Awards BUSINESSES FOR AN ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE TOMORROW So, the topic of sustainable business is important in research and in our regional economy, and is of great interest to our College of Business. Why can’t the COB just use a business database to retrieve citations and articles on sustainable business?

Searching for sustainability green Searching for sustainability Articles on the topic of sustainable business are difficult to search for in abstracting & indexing databases. Keywords are not consistent for the subject area, and different terms relating business to environmental or social issues can be used. Sustainable or sustainability is not always one of the keywords chosen by authors, or used in titles. It is difficult to filter the non-relevant materials in order to identify only relevant ones. Even if articles were simple to find in abstracting and indexing databases, a portal, especially one that could be easily constructed, offers additional benefits to researchers and students. All the citations have been chosen by experts who found them relevant. The portal allows researchers to upload citations as they find them and to share comments and recommendations with users. Portals offer a dynamic and collaborative experience for the user.

benefits of collaboration + for COB Access to an important subject for the college Ability to share information with colleagues more easily Collaboration Visibility within the COB and the university for this topic and the researchers who are working on it. +for Library This project could be expanded upon to include other types of sustainable business information or fit into a larger collection for business. The project strengthens the existing relationship with the College of Business The project could be used as a test case and example for the Institutional Repository Fits in with strategic plan for digital library

Subject portal options After our meetings with COB faculty, we wrote a preliminary project proposal for library administration and began investigating software options to meet the needs of the project. OSU Libraries were at the time setting up an institutional repository (IR), so one option we investigated was migrating the Sustainable Business Database to the IR platform. However, it soon became apparent that the DSpace software used for the institutional repository would not work for this project without a significant amount of additional programming. We could store the citation records in the IR, but as we did not own copyright on any of the articles referenced, we needed to link out to the full-text of articles. We identified two tools built by the Internet Scout Project that seemed to fit our requirements for the online access that the College of Business desired for their database. Both the Scout Portal Toolkit and CWIS addressed the needs of the project. We chose CWIS. Jeremy will now talk about that investigative process and about the CWIS software.

CWIS (see-wis) Jeremy

CWIS - Collection Workflow Integration System Developed via funding from the NSF/NSDL and the Mellon Foundation “software to assemble, organize, and share collections of data about resources”.

Customization Margaret The CWIS software is flexible. As Jeremy noted, the you can choose to display features of the software such as news or the recommender system. You can give registered users rights to update content, to create new records. You can add fields to the database and show h

url - persistent link - check with vendor. DOI - inconsistent, but could be used by link resolvers Added fields: publication year volume issue, DOI Controlled vocabulary: author, classification, journal name, keywords added become Ability to add alternative vocabulary AMJ for Academy of Management Journal, for example

Add new fields Change names of fields Change attributes of fields for example whether or not to make the field searchable in keyword or in advanced search, also the search weight to give it.

Ability to enable to disable functions within fields. After looking for a thesaurus for this topic, we discussed with COB faculty what they would find useful and determined that these broad classifications would be used. You can import a thesaurus; create your own simple or elaborate structure.

If you are going to customize the interface, you will need to do some programming. In CWIS, the code for the functionality of the database is separate from the code for the interface, but you will still need to understand html, php and css.

Caveats What we learned along the way - Freely available isn’t free Customizing the interface requires time, programming skills and proper administrative rights on the server A smattering of UNIX, php, mysql is a definite plus Try to get some money for your project A project like this is not necessarily finished on a time line - plan for longer term “sustainability” ? It’s okay to do pilot projects like this to see how they will work in your organization

Community Jeremy ? Social software - allows easy creation of community of scholars - experts select what goes in the database, the recommender system can help users discover the “best” information, forums add conversation to the mix. How this type of software fits into the digital library OAI harvesting Integrated into MetaSearch Rather than “if you build it they will come” if you give them the tools, they will come and build it themselves.