1. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk 10 minute practical guide to the JISC Information Environment (for publishers!) Andy Powell UKOLN, University of Bath a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk 21 June 2002

2. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk What do you need to do? support machine oriented (m2m) interfaces to your content/services not contentious... –in line with ‘Web services’ approach not just about ‘portals’... –subject portal, reading list tool in VLE, library ‘portal’ (e.g. Zportal or MetaLib), SFX service component, personal desktop reference manager

3. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Allow searching… support distributed searching of your content by remote services offer Bath Profile compliant Z39.50 target use Z39.50 to expose simple Dublin Core metadata about your content note possible use of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) in the future

4. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Allow harvesting… enable remote services to gather your metadata records offer Open Archives Initiative repository using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting use OAI-PMH to expose simple DC metadata about your content ‘as well as’ OR ‘instead of’ offering Z39.50 target

5. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Share news/alerts using RSS offer machine-readable news and alerting channel(s) news/alerts might include –service announcements –list(s) of new resources RSS = RDF Site Summary –simple XML application use RSS in addition to existing email alerting

6. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Become an OpenURL source adopt ‘open’, ‘context-sensitive’ linking in the form of OpenURLs add OpenURLs into search results –e.g. SFX buttons next to each result support mechanism to associate preferred OpenURL resolver with each user –e.g. cookies or user-preferences database

7. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Become an OpenURL target allow links back into your services from OpenURL resolvers publicise your ‘link-to’ syntax, e.g. –ISSN-based URLs –DOI-based URLs support deep-linking direct to resources –direct to resource, OR –indirect via abstract page

8. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Use persistent IDs Z39.50, OAI-PMH and RSS expose your metadata to other services allow deep-linking from metadata (e.g. search results) to resource deep-linking URLs should be unique and persistent –possibly based on DOIs why? allows long-term use of URLs, e.g. in course reading list

9. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Authentication issues how do I control access? same as currently - using Athens (or your own system) –user challenged on entry to ‘portal’ –portal can determine some ‘search’ access rights from Athens, but you may need to ‘trust’ portal –ZBLSA portal/pub query mechanism –you retain final control at point of access

10. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Branding vs. visibility will exposing metadata to external service lead to loss of branding? not really - expect external services to carry your branding as ‘quality stamp’ –e.g. RSS channel carries your name, URL and logo following URL in search results leads direct to your site –so more visibility rather than less

11. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Final thought... not just about a one-way low of information - from ‘you’ to ‘us’ also exposes content within the academic community for example... –RDN offers Z39.50 access to 50,000 resource descriptions (soon to offer SOAP interface) –you can integrate this into your ‘portals’

12. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Links to further information JISC Information Environment technical architecture www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed- systems/dner/arch/ JISC Information Environment and Web services www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/information- environments/

13. a centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk