ViTaL

SFX, the link resolver component of ViTaL has been launched for testing at the Natural History Museum, London. The latest version of the software is running in Consortium mode in preparation for other EDIT institutions to be added.

At present, only NHM subscription holdings (as well as free ones of course) are available and over the next few weeks, we will be ensuring that the Knowledge Base (which describes our subscribed to titles with date ranges) is fully up to date. We will then be in a position to start adding the next sites.

The base URL of the link resolver is http://ourl.vital.nhm.ac.uk/vital-nhmlondon and this should be used in any openurl source compliant database which wishes to link using the service.

Watch out for further announcements shortly.

ViTaL is part of the EDIT project, which is creating a European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy. EDIT’s goal is to create a network supporting taxonomy for biodiversity and ecosystem research.

EDIT is creating tools and forging links between institutions throughout Europe and beyond which will help reduce many of the impediments currently affecting biological taxonomic work.

ViTaL's part in this is to aid the discovery and accessibility of taxonomically relevant literature through the provision of four main services:

1. ViTaL’s metasearch component will allow searching across a targeted set of taxonomic resources, including library catalogues, databases and e-journals.
2. ViTaL will make available an OpenURL resolver, allowing users to click through their search results to full text content where this is available (through resources such as e-journals or repositories like the Biodiversity Heritage Library), or otherwise to a set of links providing search functions.
3. ViTaL will include a bibliographic reference aggregator, which will harvest references from a range of sources and to provide a centralised bibliographic resource.
4. ViTal will also provide a facility which will enable users of taxonomic literature to nominate suitable materials for digitization. These requests will be available to users of the site and also to members of digitisation projects, allowing them to make use of this information in the prioritisation and planning of scanning schedules.

The components making up ViTaL are currently under development at the Natural History Museum, London. ViTaL is being developed by staff at the Museum in consultation with the EDIT applications development team based in Berlin.

I glad to say that Metalib is now installed on our server at the Natural History Museum here in London. My colleagues in the library here are now working with me to configure the system. It's a significant piece of work, in that we are ultimately trying to support users from 27 diffrerent institutions around Europe under the umbrella of a single instance of the Ex Libris suite of applications. We are pushing the envelope somewhat, with much trial and error involved.

We are currently testing different approaches to the problem of giving each institution their own set of search pages. I believe we will be using the Metalib 'portal' feature to support this, combined with setting up resource categories for each EDIT parner, so we can maximise the quality of the results by taking into account institutional subscriptions and language preferences.

While the deep configuration work is going on, I will be contacting our partner libraries to get more of their Z39.50 and other details to add to our knowledgebase which runs behind Metalib.

You may have noticed a recent flurry of activity on the site regarding a new feature which we will be piloting soon. This is a system allowing interested users to post requests for the scanning of specific items, e.g. books, ranges of journal volumes and so on, which are currently unavailable in electronic form. ViTaL is not involved directly with any scanning projects, but this service will be available to the administrators of such projects. We hope that this will help the prioritization and scheduling of scanning for projects like the BHL and others. I have asked colleagues with interests in botany and microbiology to test the initial version of the request system. So far it seems to be working as we would like.

I plan to set up a separate RSS feed for scanning requests which should help with the general dissemination of the information.

It should be noted that requests for items covered by copyright are unlikely to result in the creation of a scanned version unless a licenced can be obtained from the copyright holder. As mentioned above, all scanning will be done by external scanning projects, and these projects will have thier own policies relating to copyright. Ultimately, the administrators of the scanning projects will decide what is scanned.

Things have been moving forward here, so time for an update. The OpenURL resolver application, SFX, is now installed on our server and this week we received our first training sessions from Christine Stohn, our technical contact at Ex Libris.

We were joined by David Iggulden and Fiona Ainsworth from the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), our nearest EDIT partner institution.

Now we have had the training, our next steps are to get SFX configured to our liking and to understand the practicalities of adding and managing subscription and user information across multiple institutions.

We will be going through a similar process with Metalib, which we plan to install and start working with in April.

The training took place at the Natural History Museum (London), and it's a pleasure to show the place off to people who haven't visited before.

We are still planning how we will roll out the service to the other EDIT partners, and it may be that we will travel to them to present a tailored training session targeted at electronic library managers. If this happens, I'm looking forward to seeing more of our partner institutions.

Anyway, I will post here when our SFX efforts are ready for testing in the wider world.

I spent most of last week at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin, where many of the EDIT developers are based.

While is was there I met up with Chris Freeland of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, who gave a talk to Museum staff about the BHL project.

ViTaL will be using the BHL catalogue as one of its data sources, so we are always keen to know about new developments. Chris has just released a suite of name services for BHL, which give programmatic access to the index of species names which have been harvested from the documents in the repository. This data has been searchable via a web browser for a while, but now other web applications can query the database and make use of the results, which opens up a number of new possibilities.

Project Co-ordinator Malte Ebach and I met with Jiri Kende of the Berlin Free University Library where we discussed our plans for ViTaL and how best to progress the work required to make the various relevant sub-libraries searchable through ViTaL.

Thomas Dürbye kindly gave me an impromptu tour of the Botanical Garden's Seedbank, and also showed me some remarkable specimens of Welwitschia mirabilis, which have been growing under glass at the Botanic Garden for over sixty years.

My visit also coincided with the departure of Malte Ebach, paleontologist and biogeographer, and most recently tower of organisational strength of the EDIT project. He is moving on to take up a post at the University of Arizona which will allow him to get back to doing his scientific work. We all wish him luck in the new role.

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Nature Publishing Group's London office to give a talk about the science of taxonomy and how taxonomists will benefit from the provision of new web based working methods, including ViTaL, scratchpads, and other components of the EDIT platform.

The talk seemed to go down well, with a lively question and answer session at the end.

Many thanks to Ian Mulvany and Timo Hannay for the opportunity to give the talk.

I'm pleased to be able to start posting to this new site where I and my fellow team members will be writing about ViTaL, the Virtual Taxonomic Library.

ViTaL is part of the EDIT project, which is creating the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy.

EDIT is creating tools and forging links between institutions throughout Europe (and beyond) which will help reduce many of the impediments currently affecting biological taxonomic work.

ViTaL's part in this work is to aid the discovery of taxonomically relevant literature. To do this we are creating a meta-searching service which will allow taxonomists to access the library catalogues of the EDIT partner institutions (and others). We will also be providing an OpenURL resolution service to provide links through to the original texts where this is possible.

In addition to the literature searching and linking functions, we will be creating a bibliographic reference aggregator which we hope will grow into a useful resource for researchers, librarians and the publishers of taxonomic information.

The project is at a relatively early stage. As we move through the process of getting ViTaL up and running will be blogging our progress here. We welcome any comments, questions and feedback you may have about the project.