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Open Access to Digital Libraries. Must Research Libraries be Expensive? William Y. Arms

Open Access to Digital Libraries. Must Research Libraries be Expensive? William Y. Arms Department of Computer Science Cornell University. Before Digital Libraries. Access to scientific, medical, legal information In the United States: -- excellent if you belonged to a rich organization

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Open Access to Digital Libraries. Must Research Libraries be Expensive? William Y. Arms

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  1. Open Access to Digital Libraries. Must Research Libraries be Expensive? William Y. Arms Department of Computer Science Cornell University

  2. Before Digital Libraries Access to scientific, medical, legal information In the United States: -- excellent if you belonged to a rich organization (e.g, a major university) -- very poor otherwise In many countries of the world: -- very poor for everybody

  3. Research Libraries are Expensive staff library materials buildings & facilities

  4. open access The Potential of Digital Libraries staff materials buildings & facilities

  5. Economic Models for Open Access Who pays for open access to information?

  6. Two Fallacies 1. The Luddite Publishing Fallacy Academic authors will never change. Prestige is determined by which journals a researcher publishes in. The prestigious journals make the rules. 2. The Free Lunch Fallacy Web publishing costs nothing. Therefore groups of researchers should publish their own research. There is no need to waste money on publishers.

  7. Four Economic Models Example: Broadcast Television Open Access Advertising network television External funding public broadcasting Restricted Access Subscription cable Pay-by-use pay-per-view

  8. Examples Old New Books in Print (subscription) Amazon.com (advertising) Medline (pay-by-use) Grateful Med (external) Journal (subscription) ePrint archives (external) Westlaw (pay-by-use) Legal Information Institute (external) Inspec (subscription) Google (advertising)

  9. 1. A mixture of economic models will coexist. 2. Eventually, we will have open access to most scientific and professional information. 3. The most common economic model will be that information is published by the producing organization. Thoughts on the Future of Open Access The dominant force is author pressure, which emphasizes open access rather than closed access. The producing organization may be a university (or part), a conference series, a laboratory, an association, etc.

  10. A New Role For Academic Libraries and Associations Academic libraries and associations can provide support for open access information: -- Establish standards for academic quality -- Maintain local archives (e.g., M.I.T.'s archive of local research) -- Protect and preserve for the long-term

  11. open access ? buildings & facilities staff materials computers & networks The Potential of Digital Libraries staff

  12. Automated Digital Libraries How effectively can computers be used for the skilled tasks of professional librarianship? -- Time horizon: 5 to 20 years -- All materials in digital form Computers cannot imitate intelligence. Can automated digital libraries provide equivalent services?

  13. Example: Catalogs and Indexes Catalog, index and abstracting records arevery expensive when created by skilled professionals -- only available for certain categories of material (e.g., monographs, scientific journals) -- contain limited fields of information (e.g., no contents page) -- restricted to static information

  14. Equivalent Services: Catalogs and Indexes Cataloguing rules -- Application of cataloguing rules is skilled -- It is hard to imagine a computer system with these skills but ... -- Cataloguing rules are the means, not the end

  15. Equivalent Services Information discovery I used to be a heavy user of Inspec. Now I use Google instead. Why are web search services the most widely used information discovery tools in universities today?

  16. Conventional Criteria Web search services have many weaknesses -- selection is arbitrary -- index records are crude -- no authority control -- duplicate detection is weak -- search precision is deplorable yet they clearly satisfy some users ...

  17. Effectiveness of Web Search Why I use Google instead of Inspec: => Broader coverage => Better ranking => Immediate access to information (e.g., open access version of published paper) Google is an equivalent service for information discovery (for some users)

  18. Simple Algorithms + Immense Computing Power

  19. Brute Force Computing Few people really understand Moore's Law -- Computing power doubles every 18 months -- Increases 100 times in 10 years -- Increases 10,000 times in 20 years Simple algorithms + immense computing power may outperform human intelligence

  20. Brute Force Computing Example Creators of the world champion chess program (Deep Thought later Deep Blue) -- moderate chess players -- simple tree-search algorithm -- very, very fast computer hardware

  21. Examples of Automated Digital Library Services

  22. Brute Force Computing:Web Search Web search engines: -- retrieve every page on the web -- index every word -- repeat every month

  23. Substitutes for Human Intelligence Automated algorithms for information discovery Closeness of match -- vector space and statistical methods (Salton, et al., c. 1970) Importance of digital object -- Google ranks web pages by how many other pages link to them (NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative)

  24. Brute Force Computing: Archiving and Preservation Internet Archive -- Monthly, web crawler gathers every open access web page with associated images -- Web pages are preserved for future generations -- Files are available for scholarly research

  25. Brute Force Computing: Reference Linking ResearchIndex (CiteSeer, ScienceIndex) (NEC) -- fully automatic -- all open access material in computer science -- a free service Contrast with theWeb of Science (ISI) -- input: combination of automatic means, skilled people -- limited number of journals -- very expensive

  26. Brute Force Computing: Automated Metadata Extraction Informedia (Carnegie Mellon) Automatic processing of segments of video, e.g., television news. Algorithms for: -- dividing raw video into discrete items -- generating short summaries -- indexing the sound track using speech recognition -- recognizing faces (NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative)

  27. Automating Interoperability Example: Cornell University's Core System for the NSDL (The National Science Foundation's digital library for science, mathematics, engineering and technology education)

  28. Levels of Interoperability A comprehensive science library: The NSDL must provide coherent services across a vast range of materials managed by organizations with many objectives. Three levels of interoperability: Federation Harvesting Gathering

  29. Federation (e.g., Z39.50 and MARC) Digital libraries that follow a full set of agreements form a federation. Standards and agreements -- Technical: formats, protocols, security systems, etc. -- Content: data and metadata (including semantics) -- Organizational: access, services, payment, authentication, etc. Federations are desirable but very demanding and hence rare

  30. Gathering (e.g., Internet Archive, Google) Gathering: service for open access information, even if information providers do not follow standard agreements: -- web crawlers gather open access information -- web search engines index it -- automated services are possible (e.g., ResearchIndex) Entirely automated

  31. Harvesting (e.g., Open Archives Initiative) Digital libraries: -- provide a brief metadata record for each item (e.g., minimal Dublin Core) -- support a simple protocol for access to this metadata Automated harvesters: -- harvest the metadata automatically -- build automated services Mainly automated

  32. Costs and Benefits

  33. Costs of Automated Digital Libraries The Google Company -- 5.5 million searches daily -- 85 people (half technical, 14 with Ph.D. in computing) -- 2,500 PCs running Linux, with 80 terabytes of disk The Internet Archive -- 7 people plus support from Alexa (March 2000)

  34. Overall If you are rich ... -- Research libraries, using commercial information services, provide excellent service at very high cost to a favored few -- Automated digital libraries are far from providing the personal service available to a faculty member at a rich university but ...

  35. The Model T Library The Model T Ford, with mass production, brought car travel to the masses ... -- Automated digital libraries, with open access materials, can already provide good service at low cost -- In the future, automated digital libraries can bring scientific, scholarly, medical and legal information to everybody

  36. Some Light Reading William Y. Arms, "Automated digital libraries." D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july20/07contents.html William Y. Arms, "Economic models for open-access publishing." iMP, March 2000. http://www.cisp.org/imp/march_2000/03_00arms.htm

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