13th EAHIL Conference - Digital libraries

Developing e-resource licensing models for Academic Health Science Centres in England

ucylbet — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:40:24 +0000

Authors:

Anagnostelis, Betsy, UCL: Royal Free Hospital Medical Library, London, United Kingdom

Abstract:

Introduction

An initial five Academic Health Science Centres (AHSCs) were officially designated by government in England in March 2009, as formal partnerships between a university and healthcare providers (1):

Cambridge University Health Partners
Imperial College AHSC
King's Health Partners
Manchester AHSC
UCL Partners.

Their aim is to deliver world-class research, education and patient care for the benefit of their local communities, then promote the application of their discoveries in the National Health Service (NHS) and across the world. Indeed, the centres were recognised as having the potential to compete globally, including with similar centres in the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands.

A report of a national review of NHS health library services in England identified that “there would be great advantages in the NHS and HE [Higher Education] working together on joint procurement” (2). Previous efforts to provide joint licensing of e-resources across the university-health service divide in England had met with varying degrees of success (3). However, one licensing model, as adopted by the London Medical Schools Group (LMSG), had produced benefits for the local constituencies over the previous decade. The consortium had been operating successfully for several years and had been reaching value-for-money agreements with a range of publishers over the provision of resources under beneficial licensing terms. The agreements in place had included full access to selected electronic resources for all HE members of the institutions as well as NHS users in 36 affiliated Trusts representing up to 56.7% of NHS staff in London. Access for users in both HE and the NHS was through their existing personal institutional or NHS ATHENS usernames and passwords, and no separate accounts had to be set up.

As anticipated by the author as early as November 2008 (4), with the links between the universities and affiliated NHS organisations becoming even stronger through AHSCs, the drive for LMSG-type licensing initiatives was unlikely to diminish. This was confirmed soon afterwards, at a meeting of key stakeholders in April 2009 convened by JISC Collections, the UK academic community e-content procurement and negotiation service. The London Medical Schools Group approach was identified as one that had produced results to date and it was suggested that the Academic Health Science Centres could be a model group in England. The role of JISC Collections to act as a neutral advisor and negotiator was also acknowledged. At a workshop with publishers in June 2010, the key objective of the AHSC representatives was presented, namely making research outputs available for the rapid translation of research findings into clinical practice and outcomes, and outline proposals were discussed. Following this, a year long pilot project was jointly established between JISC Collections, AHSCs and major STM publishers and database suppliers (5).

Objectives

As clearly specified at the outset of the project, the aim was to develop “sustainable models for enhanced provision of access to high quality e-content across NHS and academic staff” (5). Over the course of the project it was intended that all stakeholders would work together to review usage, administration, and licensing requirements arising from the pilot. It was anticipated that the pilot would contribute significantly towards the development of possible e-resource licensing models for Academic Health Science Centres in England.

Methods

Co-ordinated by JISC Collections, the proposal adopted for the pilot allowed the universities at the centre of the AHSCs to extend to their partner NHS organisations access to their subscribed content from Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, Springer, Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer Health. All five publishers granted this extended access at no additional cost for 2011 in the first instance.

Results

A series of challenges became obvious as the pilot developed:

Identifying the content to be made available
- in some cases, only sub-sets of the academic subscribed content was made available to NHS users
- acquiring a definitive list of the journal titles was sometimes problematic
Enabling access to the resources through NHS Athens
- access to a first set of resources was enabled in December 2010; access to the last set was enabled in May 2011
Enabling access via the NHS Link Resolver
- a variety of different complications arose when attempting to match publisher-enabled sets of resources against the NHS Link Resolver knowledge base
Deciding how to present the resources to users
- not all pilot resources could be presented through the NHS Link Resolver (eg databases)
- additionally signposting of resources using MyAthens was necessary
Sharing the knowledge so that all pilot participant sites could benefit
- not all local NHS Athens and NHS Link Resolver administrators were sufficiently skilled in all aspects requiring attention
- guides were produced, so that expertise could be shared over issues arising in implementation
Communicating with library site managers and NHS Athens and NHS Link Resolver administrators to ensure the pilot project would filter through to the end users
- marketing and promotion ideas and template texts were shared, with a soft launch selected at first in the first half of 2011 and a more targeted promotion in August 2011 to coincide with a new cohort of doctors entering postgraduate training in the NHS
Communicating with other AHSC-like organisations over the scope of the pilot and potential prospects
- the relevance of the pilot (for both publishers and the NHS and HE communities more widely) required an approach that could be easily adapted and adopted beyond the immediate AHSC set-up

Despite all the above challenges and efforts to overcome these, some sites were still showing 0 usage at the end of 2011. Given the start-up delays, the pilot was extended to the end of May 2012 with four out of the five publishers continuing to participate, so as to allow sufficient usage data to be collected.

A first analysis of comparative usage data and other findings was initially undertaken in December 2011 and then again in March 2012. As anticipated, levels of use by NHS staff were demonstrably low throughout, especially when compared to HE levels of use.

Discussion

The AHSC pilot has been well received, even though opportunities to promote it widely were restricted by start-up delays. Nonetheless, there have been indirect benefits as the pilot has raised the visibility of library services provision within the participating AHSC NHS Trusts. Importantly, publishers are recognising the imperative behind the AHSC library services’ preferences for joint licences and are tentatively beginning to explore how such licences may be offered.

Initial feedback indicates that at least some publishers may be prepared to enter into licence extension agreements on a revenue neutral basis provided a usage data threshold is set. It is understood that any model that emerges should be scalable to other joint university / healthcare provider arrangements, such as teaching hospitals in England and elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

The pilot raised some interesting considerations:

The academic institution at the centre of the AHSC would need to be fully engaged in the processes involved: licence extension would by definition need to be based on the existing licence of the academic institution.
Publishers would need to be prepared to undertake some customisation to ensure seamless access to their resources via the NHS link resolver: simply enabling access via NHS Athens would not be sufficient; indeed, access through all routes that users expect to access the resources would be key for take-up.
Library services supporting the AHSCs would also need to be prepared to take actions to establish seamless access for NHS users: workflows could be determined to implement access within an AHSC; once resources are enabled successfully, it is expected that no additional set-up should be required.

Specific findings from the AHSC pilot and possible implications for future e-resource licensing in England will be presented at the conference. Other work is also ongoing towards a national licensing agreement to enable access to research outputs and any progress in this area will also be reviewed.

Keywords:

Access to Information, Group Purchasing, Library Collection Development, Licensure, Periodicals as Topic

References:

Department of Health. NHS patients to benefit as top flight Academic Health Science Centres named [Internet]. News Release issued by COI News Distribution Service; 2009 March 9 12:53 [cited 2012 April 29]. Available from: http://www.wired-gov.net/wg/wg-news-1.nsf/0/12F26C3313D994838025757400470B87?OpenDocument
Hill P. Report of a national review of NHS health library services in England: from knowledge to health in the 21st century [Internet]. NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement; 2008 March [cited 2012 April 29]. Available from: http://www.libraryservices.nhs.uk/document_uploads/NHS_Evidence/national_library_review_final_report_4feb_081.pdf
Spink S, Urquhart C, Cox A, with HEA-ICS. Procurement of electronic content across the UK National Health Service and Higher Education sectors [Internet]. Report to JISC executive and LKDN executive; 2007 [cited 2012 April 29]. Aberystwyth: Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University. Available from: http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Reports/Joint-NHSHE-procurement-report/
Anagnostelis B. London models of joint procurement. Poster presented at Celebrating the NHS/HE Partnership Conference; 2008 November 26 [cited 2012 April 29]; London, UK; 2008. Available from: http://www.londonlinks.nhs.uk/events/celebrating-the-nhs-he-partnership
Earney L. New pilot project looks to develop licensing models for Academic Health Science Centres [Internet]. News feed published 2011 February 28 [cited 2012 April 29]. Available from: http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/News/New-pilot-project-looks-to-develop-licensing-models-for-Academic-Health-Science-Centres/

Session:

Session I. Library Management

Ref:

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Oral presentation

Metadata enrichment in a medical institutional repository for evaluation purpose

Isabelle.de-Kaenel — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:30:33 +0000

Authors:

Djeddou, Natalia

Godel, Sylvie

Iriarte, Pablo

Lausanne Medical University Library

Abstract:

Background

At the Medical Faculty Lausanne, the institutional repository plays a dual role. On one hand it is an OAI-PMH server, disseminating research results financed by public funds. On the other hand it is a directory of academic publications, which can be used to evaluate the Faculty scientific output.

Methods

In Lausanne, the assessment of published medical articles – at an individual or institutional level – relies on the collection for each reference of the following data :

the citation count as indicated by Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS),
the journal impact factors (IF) calculated by the Journal Citation Report (JCR),
the Research Production Unit (RPU), which is an IF normalized by research field.

However, other characteristics are also taken into account such as the type of article (original article, case report, review, etc.), the total number of authors per article and the author’s position (first, last, middle).

To gather all these data, three main resources have to be used and their information merged:

PubMed: provides publications metadata and publication types categorization.
Web of Science: provides citation counts and complete authors lists with affiliations.
JCR: provides IF and journal subject categories used for the RPU normalization.

Bibliometric data and some publication metadata elements are collected from WoS because PubMed presents some shortcomings, starting with the lists of authors and the affiliations. For example, between 1983 and 1996, the number of authors was limited to 10 in Pubmed, then to 25. Since 2000, PubMed lists all the authors, but, surprisingly, only the institutional affiliation of the first author is mentioned.

The merging of information from these different sources requires the use of identifiers, web services and AJAX techniques. It is not an easy process, since bridges have to be built between the different databases. Three main identifiers (PMID for PubMed, UT for WoS and ISSN for JCR) play a major role in order to map information between the databases. These identifiers have to be collected and aggregated with the other metadata stored in the repository.

The Lausanne Medical Library has taken the responsibility to build and maintain the techniques and processes connecting the international databases with the repository and to deliver accurate bibliometric information to the faculty research evaluation unit on a regular basis.

Results

Using PubMed and WoS web service, an AJAX technique was developed to import metadata into the repository entry form, allowing researchers and librarians to fill the bibliographic fields by typing in one identifier only (either PMID, or DOI or UT). This kind of metadata import avoids input errors and waste of time.

Besides, the process allows the collection of some important international identifiers such a DOI and ISSN for every single reference. When the repository metadata are complete and accurate, then the harvesting of bibliometric data runs smoothly. For example, a web service can retrieve the WoS unique identifier (UT) and citation count just by processing a PMID or DOI. The opposite is not so easy, but a DOI can link to both UT and PMID. Afterwards, the IF and RPU elements are automatically assigned to the publication metadata using the journal ISSN. Very often, the ISSN versions provided by PubMed differ with the ISSN versions indicated by JCR. The librarians had to build a table mapping the ISSNs used in both databases. This table was created using the complete list of ISSNs provided by the international ISSN registration agency (www.issn.org).

Standard numbers are not always used in a standardized way in the international databases. A good monitoring of this kind of discrepancies is part of the data curation role the librarians can play.

Keywords:

Bibliometrics, Publishing, Bibliographic Databases

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Poster

The Norwegian Electronic Health Library; open access, collaboration and sharing

sigrunespelien — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:22:52 +0000

Authors:

Aasen, Sigrun Espelien

Abstract:

The Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services and The Norwegian Electronic Health Library (www.Helsebiblioteket.no) aim to make quality assured health services research and health information freely available to all health professionals and the general population of Norway. Open access is set forth in the guidelines of our work.
Helsebiblioteket.no was established in 2006 and has been a great success in Norway.

Local librarians as ambassadors:
A Section for Medicine and Health (SMH) was formally established under the Norwegian Library Association in 1975. This section has been very vital and important for collaboration between librarians within the field of medicine and health, both in Norway and internationally. Helsebiblioteket.no has great advantage of the competence of SMH members working all over Norway in different health institutions. The librarians are important mediators of Helsebiblioteket.no. We make each other better. Quite recently Norwegian have gained access to most of the important medical resources on the national IP address, so the staff at Helsebiblioteket.no work for closer collaboration with our public libraries in Norway. With a new reform in health care, stressing the need of more collaboration between community and hospital care, this is important and natural.

Health education and promotion.
Dr. Peter Fredrik Hjort (1924-2011) was an outstanding practitioner, educator, researcher, creator of health policy and a proponent of medical ethics and quality of life for patients and their families.
We honored Peter F. Hjort through collecting and making the most of his publications available in www.Cristin.no (Current research information system in Norway), with links to full text in HeRA (Helsebiblioteket’s Research Archive) and other open archives by the end of 2011. This is much appreciated by health professionals.

MeSH translation to Norwegian.
Another important project, focusing on collaboration between libraries, health services and The Language Council of Norway, is the Norwegian translation of the "Medical Subject Headings" (MeSH). We have great support from NLM and Karolisnka Institute in Stockholm.

Keywords:

Digital libraries Open access Collaboration MeSH translation Evidence-based library and information practice EBM support

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Poster

Journals of the Health Sciences field in the Portal de Revistas da USP: an alternative Brazilian information resource

Sibele Fausto — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:36:42 +0000

Authors:

Fausto, Sibele, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract:

Introduction

The Portal de Revistas da USP - Portal of Journals of the USP, is an electronic library that collects journals published under the responsibility of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Launched in 2008 with 31 scientific journals, aiming to increase the visibility of those USP journals published in the national and international context, adopted the SciELO model of electronic publishing, a non-profit metapublisher launched in 1997 by Latin-American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information - BIREME, the Pan American Health Organization - PAHO and the World Health Organization-WHO, in partnership with the Sao Paulo State Research Foundation - FAPESP, to provide easy and free access to the full text and to allow users to obtain indicators of scientific production, as reports of citations and co-authors [1]. The purpose of this work is show the current configuration of the Portal de Revistas da USP, highlighting the periodicals about Health, spreading an initiative as an alternative resource to scientific journals' visibility and to the free access for Health Community in Brazil.

Methods

The data about the journals were obtained from the Portal de Revistas da USP in its official website (http://portal.revistasusp.sibi.usp.br) , and it was consulted the current number of journals in total and by area, highlighting those about Health, verifying their configuration, including the indexing in Web of Science – WoS (by Thomson Reuters), Scopus (by Elsevier) and SciELO databases.

Results

Currently (Figue 1) the Portal de Revistas da USP has 62 scientific journals, and the website informs (April 27, 2012) that there are 2.592 journal issues, 31.610 articles with 650.341 citations, being 20 titles from the area of Health Sciences, that along with the Human Sciences (20 titles), each one performing 29% from total, following by the Applied Social Sciences, with 15 titles (21%), Biological Sciences, 6 titles (8%), Agricultural sciences with 4 titles (6%), Linguistics, Language and Arts with 3 titles (4%), and Exact & Earth Sciences, 2 titles (3%). SciELO database indexes the more than 20 Health Sciences journals (11 titles), followed by Scopus (8 titles) and finally, the WoS with 7 titles; while 7 Health Sciences journals are in all resources, 3 both in SciELO and Scopus, and 1 in SciELO and WoS. And 9 journals are not indexed in any of these sources yet.

Discussion and Conclusion

The Portal de Revistas da USP grew 50% in three years: in 2009 there were 31 scientific journals registered [2], and today there are 62. In Health Sciences, the number of indexed bonds increased from 15 in 2009 to 20 in 2012, a growth around 34%. It is an important evolution in the context of the publishing difficulties in non-English speaking countries. The adoption of the SciELO metapublisher increased the journals visibility, also allowing to obtain indicators of scientific production. Such initiatives should be encouraged and disseminated, focusing on alternatives to scientific literature excluded from mainstream science publishing.

Keywords:

Bibliographic Databases, Online Systems, Information Storage and Retrieval, Periodicals as Topic

Legend Figure:

Figure 1: Areas covered and number of indexed journals by database

References:

1. Meneghini R (2003). SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library on Line) project and the visibility of "Peripheral" scientific literature. Quím. Nova 26 (2): 155-156. Available: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/qn/v26n2/14980.pdf . Accessed april 20, 2012.

2. Fausto S, Gamba C (2009). Setting initial benchmarks of the Portal de Revistas da USP: for a culture of assessment. In: Larsen B & Leta J. (eds). Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), Rio de Janeiro: BIREME/PAHO/WHO , Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, vol 2, pp. 928-929. Available: http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/15419/1/Final_Version_ISSI2009_CRC_poster259.pdf. Accessed april 25, 2012.

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Poster

Hydra's and 3D brains - the wonderful world of embedding repositories to institutional services and processes

laurian.williamson — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:54:51 +0000

Authors:

Williamson, Laurian, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Abstract:

The extensive network of Institutional repositories (IRs) in the United Kingdom (UK) have received substantial investment from JISC, the UK’s expert on information and digital technologies for education and research.

This portfolio of six projects, JISC Repositories: Take-Up and Embedding (JISCrte) aim to improve institutional services that rely on the repository by enabling take-up of the lessons and benefits from the most successful repository applications, tools and good practice; and contribute to the progress of embedding repositories within academic life in the UK Higher Education (HE) environment.

The JISCrte project is part of the JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11 and JISCrte will be completed in December 2011. Project findings and outcomes will be made available in Spring 2012.

The six projects involved include:

eNova (Visual Arts Data Service),
Hydra in Hull (University of Hull),
NECTAR (University of Northampton),
RADAR (Glasgow School of Art),
MIRAGE (Middlesex University),
EXPLORER (De Montfort University).

In this paper we will explore the value of project outputs to the health and life science repository community and in particular MIRAGE, a subject repository of more than 100,000 medical images.

We will consider the challenges of content-based retrieval of 3D medical images (especially visualisation of 3D images) and providing repository users with the facility to upload their own query images (either by URL or from browsing their own image collection on their desktop).

Keywords:

Access to Information, Imaging, Three-Dimensional, Brain, Archives, Databases, Factual

Session:

Session E. New technologies

Ref:

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Oral presentation

Digital Preservation of Biomedical Documents - State of the Art

Korwitz — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:37:26 +0000

Authors:

Korwitz, Ulrich, Deutsche Zentralbibliothek fuer Medizin, Germany

Abstract:

With growing numbers of digital materials in our libraries, predominantly pdf-files and audiovisual files, there is a substantial need to preserve these documents for use in the future. The German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED) carried out a project together with the Technical Information Library in Hanover and the German National Library of Economics in Kiel/Hamburg using the digital preservation system Rosetta.

It has proven that the technical needs can be fulfilled with such a technological system including ingesting processes and migration processes. It is of utmost importance however to identify which documents are in stock in a library and in which conditions they are (file types and subtypes).

It has to be be discussed who should be responsible for digital preservation in each country as high workload and high costs are connected with the operation of a digital preservation system.

Keywords:

Digital preservation

Session:

Session E. New technologies

Ref:

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Oral presentation

Integration of OpenAthens Local Authentication (OpenAthens LA) as a user authentication system for the Virtual Health Sciences Library of the Balearic Islands.

vpaez — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 08:17:33 +0000

Authors:

Páez, Virgili

Costa-Marín, Maria

Pastor-Ramon, Elena

Peláez-Jiménez, Mónica

Sastre-Suárez, Sílvia

Keywords:

Digital libraries, Medical libraries, Remote access, Users authentication

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Poster

A sustainable 23 Things for EAHIL

ilk21 — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:43:08 +0000

Authors:

Buset, Karen

van den Brekel, Guus

Kuhn, Isla

Keywords:

continuing education, medical libraries, internet, 23 Things,

From digitization towards digital preservation - building a digital library system for medical information users

filip.kriz — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:26:35 +0000

Authors:

Kriz, Filip, National Medical Library, Czech Republic

Bouzkova, Helena, National Medical Library, Czech Republic

Horsak, Ondrej, National Medical Library, Czech Republic

Jarolimkova, Adela, National Medical Library, Czech Republic

Maixnerova, Lenka, National Medical Library, Czech Republic

Lesenkova, Eva, National Medical Library, Czech Republic

Lesny, Petr, Charles University - 2nd Faculty of Medicine, Czech Republic

Abstract:

Introduction

The development of specialized digital libraries and archives in the Czech Republic has been stated in the official document "Conception of permanent preservation of traditional library collections and electronic documents in Czech libraries". National Medical Library (NML) has been in the process of building a digital library since 2009 using Czech open source software tool - digital library system Kramerius. In order to maintain and evolve our digital library and its content and services it has become necessary to establish an encompassing project to build a solid digital preservation system compliant with the Open Archival Information System Reference model (OAIS).

NML has successfully applied for the Ministry of Health Internal Grant Agency (IGA) project funded between years 2011-2013. The project aims at "creation of a long term digital preservation system in the NML, which will allow permanent archiving and accessibility of full texts of scientific publications in the field of medical disciplines". The main goals of the project are: development of digital preservation system using PLATTER (Planning tool for Trusted Electronic Repositories[1]) process, building digitization workplace and department, implementation of suitable data storage in NML's datacenter, and digitization of 4.000 IGA final grant reports.

Access to the archived content is facilitated by recently developed Medvik web portal (http://www.medvik.cz/bmc) which provides access to Czech medical bibliography database (BMC) and medical union catalogues. Thus the links to full-text can be displayed directly at the articles level where available. NML has put a lot of effort into solving legal aspects by special licensing agreements to make the most of full texts freely accessible to every user. Content of the repository comes in several formats from different sources and efforts - in-house digitization and external digitization projects, collaboration with Czech publishers or contributed directly by authors. The majority of content from publishers and authors are PDF files. There are currently 100 scientific journals and +1000 other documents archived. The complexity of archived digital objects vary from single page images with OCR in separated text files over article and volume level PDF files to whole large documents as one PDF file.

Objectives

The selection of suitable data and metadata formats used by the repository is essential and affects many operations in the Acquisition, Data and Preservation planning objectives defined by PLATTER. For the long term preservation of the IGA final reports and digital born scientific publications NML has chosen PDF/A-1 format [2]. The main reasons are that it is open, standardized, self-contained and indexable format, suitable for page-oriented textual documents and it is usual in scientific communication. Newly acquired reports in digital form will be compliant with PDF/A-1b standard, the objects in PDF formats already archived in the repository will be converted to PDF/A-1b and the PDF documents from authors will be converted during the ingest workflow. The conversion process shall use thoroughly tested tool(s) to provide valid and well-formed files. This research aims at evaluation of available PDF to PDF/A converters which will be the most suitable in terms of consistency and reliability.

Methods

Technical metadata available were not sufficient for the analysis of digital objects stored in the repository. Thus the content has been analyzed using JHOVE [3] open source tool which provides functions to perform format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital objects. The list of files stored in the repository has been digested from the file system using simple batch command: repository>dir /b /s /aa > filelist. The list was used as input for a simple batch files implementing JHOVE and converters command line interfaces (CLI).

Several PDF/A manipulating software products mostly in trial versions have been downloaded and evaluated. The testing was performed in two phases: 1) evaluation of available converters based on conversion of PDF files from the Isartor test suite [4]; and 2) test conversion of all PDF files in the repository using the tools selected in the first phase. The converted Isartor files have been cross-validated that the best-performing PDF/A converters could be identified. The best applicable tools have made progress to the second phase. The conversion logs and reports have been processed and imported into SQL database for further analysis.

Results

The analysis revealed there are 189,917 digital objects in the repository - DjVu, TXT, PDF and Jpeg files - with total size of 43.6 gigabytes (GB), of which PDF files are 9079 with the size of 17.6 GB. The JHOVE version used in the analysis supported only PDF up to version 1.6 so the results had to be enhanced by 3-Heights PDF Validator which can output the files claimed conformance level. The results of combined analysis are displayed in Fig. 1 (1b = PDF/A-1b). There were found 15 corrupted PDF files.

Comparison based on conversion and cross-validation of Isartor test suite involved processing of 203 files (1 removed - isartor-6-1-12-t01-fail-a - some tools became unresponsive when converting it). The test suite is specially designed to reveal flaws in a PDF/A manipulating tools. All selected tools correctly marked the 203 files as invalid. The comparison of conversion results can be seen in Tab. 1. The total score is the sum of percentages of successfully passed and validated files (self-validation and the worst result for each converter were excluded). Intarsys tool was used for validation only due to trial restricted conversion limit. Callas tool speed performance was unsatisfactory and was not used in the cross-validation. The comparison has shown quite differences between the tools.

Results of PDF Technologies and VERYDOC products were very bad and the tools cannot be recommended even for personal use. Solid Documents performed poor and inconsistent validation but delivered good conversion results - the tool might do well as desktop solution in personal or office use. Callas performed unsatisfactorily in conversion success rate though it offers many additional functions (which have not been relevant for this research).

The three of the tools passed into the second testing phase but only PDFTron and 3-Heights were finally compared because LuraTech product did not provide any CLI (only graphic interface with folder and subfolders input) and could not process the repository file list - moving the files out from the repository system has not been an option. 3-Heights product converted successfully 99.3% of the files with 48 failed and the conversion lasted 8 hours. PDFTron converted successfully 93.1% of the files with 610 failed and the conversion lasted 1.3 hours. Estimated conversion time for LuraTech based on the first phase test is 1.5 hour; for Callas 37.5 hours.

Discussion

There were previous efforts trying to determine chances of success for migration of a PDF files collections to PDF/A [5] though only one commercial tool had been used which is not available any more. Our research used the Isartor test suite for evaluation of current commercially available software tools - no mature open source software have been found. The results proved that using the test suite is good starting point in evaluation of PDF/A conversion capabilities and it can impact conversion result significantly. The final decision must be based on testing of repository's own digital objects and depends very much on specific conversion needs - in our scenario the ability to batch process a list of PDF files. There are other features and aspects of evaluated tools that might have influence on the decision - enhancing OCR and metadata capabilities, CLI/desktop/server service modes of operations, SDK availability etc. LuraTech tool has shown promising results and it might be possible to use its software development kit (SDK) and write custom code for the conversion task. The quality testing of our output test files needs to be done yet and we plan to compare 5% of converted files at least to be visually identical to the original before finally selecting the conversion tool.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the Ministry of Health Internal Grant Agency, Czech Republic, project no. NT12345

Keywords:

Digital libraries, Information storage and retrieval, Information services, Medical libraries, digital preservation

Legend Figure:

Results of format identification and validation

Legend Table:

Comparison of conversion results

References:

DigitalPreservationEurope. Repository Planning Checklist and Guidance DPED3.2. 2008 Apr [cited 2012 Apr 27]. Available from: http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications/reports/Repository_Planning_Checklist_and_Guidance.pdf
PDF/A-1, PDF for Long-term Preservation, Use of PDF 1.4 [Internet]. Library of Congress, Digital Preservation. [last updated 2009 Feb 25; cited 2012 Apr 27]. Available from: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000125.shtml
JHOVE - JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment [Internet]. JSTOR. [last updated 2009 Feb 25; cited 2012 Apr 27]. Available from: http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/
Isartor Test Suite [Internet]. PDF Association. 2011 [cited 2012 Apr 27]. Available from: http://www.pdfa.org/2011/08/isartor-test-suite/
Walker FL, Gallagher ME, Thoma GR. PDF File Migration to PDF/A: Technical Considerations. Proc. IS&T Archiving; 2007 May; Arlington, Virginia. 2007 [cited 2012 Apr 27]. p. 6-11. Available from: http://www.lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/lhc/docs/published/2007/pub2007020.pdf

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Poster

Libguides – the librarian created portals to high quality scientific research information

j.c.e.kloens — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:00:53 +0000

Authors:

Kloens, Els, University Medical Center Groningen

Presentation / Poster:

Poster LibGuides from Els Kloens

Abstract:

What is a LibGuide?

The Central Medical Library started to develop LibGuides last year, in collaboration with the University Library Groningen. A LibGuide is a basic guide with a selective overview of resources and tools in a particular field with students and beginning researchers being primary targets. The set of all LibGuides of the University of Groningen is available at: http://LibGuides.rug.nl /

Why we chose for LibGuides

LibGuides are the successors of the Electronic Literature Guides, which the library previously offered to students and beginning researchers.

These Literature Guides were manually edited overviews of resources per field on the library website. However, over time we became less satisfied with the Literature Guides, mainly because keeping them up-to-date was a laborious task and our web platform offers no Web 2.0 capabilities such as RSS or integration with social media.

During our search for a better solution to create overviews of library resources we found Springshare’s LibGuides (http://www.springshare.com/LibGuides/). No other tool met our requirements as well as the LibGuides. The LibGuides are made by librarians for librarians and are already used by many libraries (so far mainly in the U.S.)

They are specially designed for our purpose: to create a basic guide with resources and tools per subject. Furthermore, they are affordable (approximately $1000,- per year), easy to make and easy to use, mobile friendly and offer many built-in tools. For example, you can integrate web chat or your virtual helpdesk inside your guides. A LibGuide is easy to integrate with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. You can simply insert web links, RSS feeds, polls, user feedback options and search boxes.

LibGuides are much easier to maintain than our former Electronic Literature Guides. Each element (or better: widget) of a LibGuide can be shared or reused in another LibGuide within the organization. For this purpose, we have made an internal ‘Derive LibGuide’ specifically for the derivation of widgets. Changes to a basic widget become automatically visible in its derived widgets.

The LibGuides can be adjusted to the visual identity of your organization by adding your logo and color.

Available medical LibGuides

To date, the Central Medical Library has compiled five LibGuides: Medicine, Dentistry, Human Movement Sciences, Neuroscience and Nursing (in Dutch), all available at: http://LibGuides.rug.nl/profile/cmb. Upon request, we can easily create more LibGuides in consultation with departments or staff members of the UMCG. The statistics show that the LibGuides meet the needs of our patrons. For example, the Medicine LibGuide had almost 18,000 views in 2011. An evaluation of the LibGuides by our patrons will follow soon.

Keywords:

Libguides, Library guides

Category:

Digital libraries

Type of presentation:

Poster