ViTaL

This is just a brief post to thank the library staff at our various partner institutions within EDIT who have been sending us their Online Public Access Catalogue details. We will be adding them as searchable resources within our pilot installation of Metalib very soon.

Also, Falx users will have noticed some interruptions to service recently. Falx itself is now running well, and the OpenURL links are now working again. We have made some configuration changes on the server which SFX runs on. This should remove accessibility issues reported by some users behind institutional firewalls.

Those with an interest in our OpenURL services should note the new resolver address: http://ourl.vital.nhm.ac.uk/vital.

I would like to announce a pilot of a search interface into Falx, our reference harvesting and indexing systemI have a number of functional and interface improvements planned, and the coverage will also be increasing significantly.

Please note that corrections to references are done by the owners of the bibliographies we have indexed, so please direct any errors in the data directly to the site owner.

Please send comments about the services to j.welby_AT_nhm.ac.uk. I will be away for a few days, but I will be incorporating issues raised in the feedback into the project roadmap when I return.

Update: In response to feedback, I have improved sorting by title, which is now insensitive to 'the', 'an', 'a' and so on, as well as making a few other tweaks. 

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.

Things have been moving forward here at a good pace in the past couple of weeks.

The ViTaL server has been delivered and installed. It is a pleasantly beefy quad core machine which should give us a solid platform to work with. It is currently being configured in preparation for the Ex Libris software installation.

On the software development side of things, I have been continuing work on the development of the bibliography harvester component of ViTaL. I am now able to harvest references from the EDIT scratchpads via OAI-PMH, and also from Connotea using their API. For the purposes of testing, the data is currently being written to text files. The next step is to add the 'plumbing' which will send this data directly to the database.

Our contacts at the various EDIT institutions will soon be receiving an invitation for their library to become involved in providing catalogue data for the literature search tool, and we also hope to use their subscription data to support full-text access where possible.

In advance of the formal contact with EDIT libraries, we are in discussions with the library at EDIT partner Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), and we hope that there will be some useful collaborative work done with them over the next few months.

Donat Agosti of the American Museum of Natural History has expressed an interest in alpha testing the bibliographic tools, which is an offer we will gladly take up. I will be recruiting other testers nearer the alpha release date, but feel free to contact me before then if you would like to be involved.

All I need to do now is to get the bibliography tools up to a testable state. To the keyboard...