Welcome

Module 1: Strategic Developments and Library Management

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

Alex Wright
Writer and Information Architect, USA

The explosive growth of social networking in recent years has triggered a dramatic shift in the way many people collect, store and organize information. As emerging Web 2.0 technologies continue to fuel an unprecedented surge of user-generated content, some technology pundits have suggested that we are witnessing the birth of a new information economy in which individuals - rather than institutions - will shape the organization of human knowledge from the bottom up.

Are libraries and other traditional gatekeepers of recorded knowledge doomed to see their cultural influence dwindle in the years ahead? Or can they adapt and respond amid this rapidly changing information landscape?

In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore that question by probing the lessons of information ages past. There have been earlier eras in human history when new information technologies threatened to disrupt the old order - the invention of writing, the advent of the printing press, and the industrialization of publishing in the nineteenth century, to name a few. By exploring the lessons of these earlier "axial periods" of information technology, we can find provocative clues that may shed light on the future of libraries in a networked world.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Alex Wright
Writer and Information Architect, USA

Wendy P. Lougee
University librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor, University of Minnesota, Meredith Wilson Library, USA

The gravitational pull of the web and the changing expectations of scholars in an Amazoogle age provide an important context for the library's planning. How are research methodologies changing? What infrastructure, broadly defined, is needed? How do disciplines differ in their requirements?

The University of Minnesota Library's series of behavioral assessments created a profile of emergent trends and disciplinary and interdisciplinary workflows. The analysis from studies with humanities, social sciences, and scientific disciplines provides a conceptual framework for understanding scholar behavior, posing the notion of "primitive" behaviors common across disciplines. An additional project furthered the analysis in exploring the value of social tools in building virtual scholarly communities.

The Minnesota studies provide foundational data to inform a strategy of library program development. The preferences and challenges of contemporary scholarly workflow inform library decisions to better integrate the library's content, services, and tools into the user's context-whether physical or virtual.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Wendy P. Lougee
University librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor, University of Minnesota, Meredith Wilson Library, USA

Anne Poulson
Executive Director, Research Libraries UK, United Kingdom

Increasingly, libraries have to justify themselves and their services. They have to demonstrate the added value that they bring both to their organisation and to the wider community. And they have to do that both in a financial sense (for example, their contribution to the collaborative importance of research outputs to the UK economy and internationally) and in an outreach sense to participate in the widening participation agenda.

Effective strategic marketing and promotion needs to be undertaken carefully in order to provide added value to the librarian's argument and to ensure eye-catching engagement internationally.

This session will focus on strategic ways to market library services within the wider organisation and with an understanding of the competition. Successful promotional tools and development of corporate identity will also be explored using examples from UK Higher Education and the recent rebranding of RLUK (Research Libraries UK), formerly known as CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries).

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Anne Poulson
Executive Director, Research Libraries UK, United Kingdom

Dr. Roswitha Poll
Former Chief Librarian, Münster University, Germany

For several decades, libraries have developed methods for assessing the quality of their services in terms of user-orientation, speed, accuracy, reliability, or cost-effectiveness.

Quality or performance measures have been used for a long time in libraries and have been described in handbooks and ISO standards. From being applied in individual libraries, the development has gone to sets of such indicators being used by groups of libraries on a regional or even national scale, often for benchmarking purposes. Such projects have been started in the last years by public libraries as well as academic libraries.

Performance measurement evaluates whether a library is effective and efficient in delivering its services. But quantity of use and quality of performance do not yet prove that users benefited from their interaction with a library. Measuring impact or outcome means going a step further and trying to assess the effect of services on users and on society. Methods for assessing such effect have been developed recently and are still very much in a testing stage.

The paper proceeds from performance indicators for different types of libraries to "indicators" for the impact of libraries and tries to connect both issues.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Dr. Roswitha Poll
Former Chief Librarian, Münster University, Germany

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

Module 2: Technological Developments: Threats and Opportunities for Libraries

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

Stephen Abram
Vice President of Innovation, SirsiDynix, USA

Can academic libraries be more open? Can we be more open to our scholars, our researchers, our learning communities, to new technologies? Can we be more open to change? How? Are there technologies that we should be trying and piloting to see if they improve the library's mandate? Which ones are worth investigating? What are the emerging learning technologies? Are there different and improved ways to enhance our organization's missions? Can we enhance our research and learning communities and attract more funding and use? What about books, OPACs, databases and interfaces? What changes are happening here?

Stephen Abram is an inveterate library watcher and strategic technology reviewer. In this session he shares the top 25 technologies that we should think about 'playing' with and finding a way to make our libraries more open to our learning communities, publishing and research. Can we drive quicker adaptation to change in our own library culture? He'll end with five suggestions to have fun with change and technology adoption.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Stephen Abram
Vice President of Innovation, SirsiDynix, USA

Marshall Breeding
Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, USA

As libraries shift toward collections of ever higher proportions of digital content, automation systems must likewise take a new form. This lecture will review the current state of library automation systems and the business climate among the companies that provide them.

Recent rounds of industry consolidation resulted in an uncomfortable narrowing of products from the traditional automation vendors. A harsh business climate contributed to the rise of the open source movement which has introduced a new dynamic in the marketplace. Open source library automation has now entered the mainstream, with support options available from a new breed of companies. Traditional automation vendors face new competition. Libraries themselves have also become involved through initiatives to produce open source products, contributing new alternatives to the mix.

A new generation of library interfaces has begun to emerge that promise to put a modern face on the library¿s collections and services on the Web. Libraries also demand better tools for managing electronic resources behind-the-scenes, fueling demand for electronic management systems. In broader terms, the molds of the library automation systems in place today were cast decades ago.

The presentation will explore the characteristics that a generation of library automation systems built anew for today¿s libraries moving forward would embrace.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Marshall Breeding
Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, USA

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard

Director of Development, State and University Library Aarhus, Denmark

The traditional online library catalogue undergoes a series of necessary changes, which are much more than just design issues. They reflect the results of several studies which clearly demonstrated the inadequacy of the OPAC to meet the user's expectations regarding functionality and coverage. Interestingly enough, the traditional catalogue is blamed for doing exactly what it was designed for - to locate known books. In the digital world users don't browse the shelves to identify the right book but are using online search engines (mostly Google) or online bookshops (mostly Amazon). The result is that the librarians are loosing out in the game of recommending material for entertainment, learning and research.

New initiatives address this problem and work on developing new resource discovery systems, which meet the demand of the digital user. In doing so, useful features from the successful sites like Google and Amazon are identified and put into a library context. One radical change compared to the traditional methods is the introduction of ranking - inspired by Google. How to introduce context and quality into the search result is another challenging question and further technology for handling several hundred millions of records must be provided.

This talk will describe, in a non-technical manner, the new developments and will address the role of the catalogue. The first part will focus on the possibilities offered by a service-oriented architecture for enriching catalogue information and for sharing services. The second part will give an overview of open source initiatives such as Solr, eXtendible Catalog, and Summa, as well as some commercial initiatives such as Endeca, Fast and Primo (ExLibris).

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard

Director of Development, State and University Library Aarhus, Denmark

Herbert Van de Sompel
Team Leader Digital Library Research, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library, USA

Scholarly usage data holds the potential to be used as a tool to study the dynamics of scholarship in real time, and to form the basis for the definition of novel metrics of scholarly impact. However, the groundwork to reliably and validly exploit usage data is lacking, and the exact nature, meaning and applicability of usage-based metrics is poorly understood.

The MESUR project led by dr. Johan Bollen at the Los Alamos National Laboratory constitutes a systematic effort to define, validate and cross-validate a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact. MESUR has collected nearly 1 billion usage events as well as all associated bibliographic and citation data from significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia to construct a massive usage data reference set.

This presentation will discuss the goals and methodology of the MESUR project, as well as some preliminary results including a first-ever map of science derived from usage data, and a comparison of a variety of metrics based on usage and citation data.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Herbert Van de Sompel
Team Leader Digital Library Research, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library, USA

YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, mash-ups and other Web 2.0 technologies are indicative of the contemporary web experience. There is a growing interest in appropriating these tools and modalities to support scholarly communication, research, and education. This requires the ability to leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of the hosting repository. This presents a challenge among others because digital objects used in scholarship and education are typically compound. For example the multi-part "virtual data" objects envisioned by the National Virtual Observatory Project, the "datuments" described in the chemistry community, and the learning objects implemented by NSDL share the property that their components are distributed over multiple databases, web servers, databases, and the like.

In order to achieve Web 2.0-like capabilities for such compound objects, the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) effort proposes an approach that is fully aligned with the Web Architecture. It specifies a resource-centric interoperability framework that recasts the repository-centric notion of digital objects to that of a bounded, URI-identified aggregation of Web resources. In this manner, compound digital objects become more integrated with the Web, and thereby more accessible to standard Web applications and clients.

A number of projects are underway that are exploring different ways that OAI-ORE can be used, with a strong emphasis on scholarly communication. Although this represents the initial target community, OAI-ORE can prove useful outside of scholarly communication environments. Indeed, Flickr Sets are nothing but aggregations of Web resources, and the Atom-based descriptions of aggregations (Resource Maps) proposed by OAI-ORE could be used to expose their identity and boundary in a machine-readable way to Web agents and applications.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Herbert Van de Sompel
Team Leader Digital Library Research, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library, USA

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

Module 3a: Hands-on: Library 2.0

Jola Prinsen
Manager Ticer, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, The Netherlands

Barbara Galik
Executive Director, Bradley University, Cullom-Davis Library, USA

Guus van den Brekel (assistant)
Coordinator Electronic Services, University Medical Center Groningen, Central Medical Library, The Netherlands

Join us for this hands-on workshop as we walk through Second Life and see what people from around the world, specifically libraries and academic institutions, have created. Learn how to move around, edit your avatar to create the look you want, how to find educational sites to assist in your teaching and learning, and much more. With the assistance of Guus van der Brekel, and use of my handouts from the Second Life 101 course I teach, we will make your transition to Second Life both smooth and fun.

In addition to learning about and how to use Second Life, other virtual worlds and why 3D environments are relevant to libraries and education will be discussed. These environments are being referred to as Web 3.0, which is both interactive and graphically enhanced and is the world of our future students who grew up with gaming.

Virtual worlds provide perfect opportunities for immersive learning, attending lectures and programs with specialists from around the world, and collaborating with colleagues worldwide. Examples of this will be included.

A side benefit is learning important skills to assist with job opportunities such as multitasking, social skills, and technology skills.

Paper, slides and recommended reading.

Barbara Galik
Executive Director, Bradley University, Cullom-Davis Library, USA

Guus van den Brekel (assistant)
Coordinator Electronic Services, University Medical Center Groningen, Central Medical Library, The Netherlands

Guus van den Brekel
Coordinator Electronic Services, University Medical Center Groningen, Central Medical Library, The Netherlands

Dorien Kieft-Wondergem (assistant)
Information Specialist, University Medical Center Groningen, Central Medical Library, The Netherlands

The development of better library information systems will always remain the core business of any serious library organization, but a shift took place towards (freely) available web-based tools for creating and managing the information workflow.

End-users are not only using these heavily, but are also creating their own preferred tools. Today's students are incorporating Web 2.0 skills in daily life, in their social and learning environments. Tomorrow's academic staff will expect to be able to use their preferred tools and resources within their work environment. Today's ánd tomorrow's libraries should support students and staff in the learning and research process by integrating their services and resources into our patrons' environments.

This practical workshop will demonstrate the use of Web 2.0 technology to empower users and librarians. During a hands-on session, participants will work with these tools. They will develop tailor-made services via personal start page software like Netvibes, making use of RSS-feeds, Widgets and Browser extensions.

We will explore the use of Netvibes and Web 2.0 tools in library staff and/or library user education/instruction. We will focus on library services which can be created almost on-the-fly with low costs and high impact. The growing use of social networks justifies the development of a library presence within these networks to reach out to our users.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Guus van den Brekel
Coordinator Electronic Services, University Medical Center Groningen, Central Medical Library, The Netherlands

Dorien Kieft-Wondergem (assistant)
Information Specialist, University Medical Center Groningen, Central Medical Library, The Netherlands

Jola Prinsen
Manager Ticer, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, The Netherlands

Module 3b: Change: Making it Happen in Your Library

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Lucy Jeynes
Director, Larch Consulting Ltd, UK

• What are the factors and situations impacting our organisations?
• What are the internally-driven issues?
• Where are we heading?

• Organisation structure
• Processes
• Technology
• Buildings
• Services
• Products
• People
• Branding
• Income/funding sources
• Etc.

Hans Geleijnse
Director Library and IT Services, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Paper, slides and recommended reading

• What is working well?
• What is going badly?
• How could we do things differently?

Lucy Jeynes
Director, Larch Consulting Ltd, UK

A facilitated exercise to explore how teams respond to change, and understand your own organisation's response.

One of the delegates, to be confirmed

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Your personal approach to leading change. Dealing with challenges. Techniques, hints and tips.

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Module 4: Libraries - Partners in Research and Open Access

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

David Prosser
Director, SPARC Europe, UK

Over the past five years the system of scholarly communications has been subject to unprecedented scrutiny. From parliamentary inquires, though European studies, to legal instruments the debate regarding access to research information has intensified. Open access and the concept of 'public access to publicly-funded research' have taken centre stage in this debate.

This paper presents some of the external forces at work in shaping the scholarly communications landscape, outlines the background behind open access, and describes the resulting policies that are shifting the environment for academics, librarians, and publishers.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

David Prosser
Director, SPARC Europe, UK

Peter Murray-Rust
University of Cambridge, Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics, UK

Digital Respositories (especially Institutional Repositories) offer the promise of capturing the output of scientific research and making it available for others, over time, over geography and over discipline. However this will not happen naturally and there are very few - if any - signs that scientists look to their institution as a place to store and disseminate their research.

The first point to realise is that all disciplines are different - one size does not fit anyone - and that even if a repository manager has a background in (one) science they are unlikely to be able to understand and support the huge variety and complexity of current research.

Much has been made of the "data deluge" - the perception that we are being overwhelmed by scientific data, but there are also severe "data droughts" where a subject does not capture their data or does not disseminate it. I find there are two main categories:

• "big science". Here the science has major investments in facilities (particle accelerators, telescopes, satellites, reactors, etc.). There is a communal understanding that the data created cost a lot, and therefore it is important to capture them. Moreover there is usually a high-profile public commitment with moral pressure to make results available to the whole world. Bioscience falls into this category as the genome projects have required major political commitment with the assurance that results must be open. Even where data are contributed by individuals there are large inter/national data centres.
• "long-tail science". Here the research is done in labs - perhaps 5-50 people in each. There is no domain support for data, and often a culture of secrecy (the results are often patented or compiled into a for-sale database). This science is no less valuable and may be on a larger scale than big science but has much less voice.

Long-tail science is difficult to support because of its fragmented nature, but I give some suggestions:

• Where the discipline has an active, trusted, society or international union, this is the natural focus for a repository. An excellent example is the International Union of Crystallography, or the European geophysical Union and there are many others.
• The scientists need somewhere to deposit their data, firstly for themselves, then for their colleagues and only after that for the world. As a result we at Cambridge have developed the policy of a department escrow repository where the scientist can rely for a short preservation. The institution can then work with the department to preserve this and to add curations and metadata if required. Dissemination will only be useful if promoted by a domain organisation, not a large number of fragmented institutions.

Peter Murray-Rust
University of Cambridge, Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics, UK

Vanessa Proudman
Project Manager, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, The Netherlands

This session will firstly look at some of the findings of a research study into how to better stimulate the population of repositories by looking at six good practices in Europe.

Critical success factors and inhibitors in filling repositories will be discussed here such as making an important connection between a repository and a CRIS (Current Research Information System), looking at how to involve research departments from the outset with plans for transferring future ownership, and the crucial awareness of the needs and information management trends amongst the disciplines being served by repository services. The success factors and inhibitors fall into six significant areas

• policy,
• organisation,
• mechanisms and influential factors for populating repositories,
• services,
• advocacy and communication and,
• legal issues.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Vanessa Proudman
Project Manager, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, The Netherlands

Vanessa Proudman
Project Manager, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, The Netherlands

Martin Reid
Team Leader for Social Sciences, University College London, UK

Legal issues have a fundamental impact on institutional repositories. Intellectual property rights govern what can and cannot be included and how contents can be used, while issues of confidentiality and liability have to be tackled and compliance with the law ensured. Understanding of legal issues is therefore essential to the creation and successful management of a repository.

This session will attempt to provide that understanding by identifying the key issues involved and drawing on the experience of the pan-European NEEO project suggest ways in which they can be tackled and resolved.

NEEO (Network of European Economists Online) is an EU funded project which aims to create a portal to leading economics research from Europe through harnessing the potential of open access repositories from 16 institutions accross the continent.

While the NEEO project is restricted to the field of economics, the IPR issues involved are applicable to all subject areas. Moreover its explicit commitment to tackling the IPR issues involved in data and datasets has relevance for scientific as well as the social sciences and arts and humanities. It is also an international project and can provide valuable insights into how to attempt to deal with IPR issues accross different jurisdictions and legal regimes.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Martin Reid
Team Leader for Social Sciences, University College London, UK

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

Module 5a: Libraries - Partners in Teaching and Learning

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

Debra Gilchrist
Dean, Libraries and Media Services, Pierce College Library, USA

Historically, the academic library's mission and role has centered on collections that meet curricular and research needs, access to those collections, and "just-in-time" information referral such as reference. While traditional statements identified the mission as a service or as supporting the instructional goals of the institution, many libraries are re-focusing that role, and phrases such a teaching library, learning library, and learner's library appear increasingly in mission statements.

The academic library's potential lies in strengthening and advancing this educational role. This workshop will focus on methods librarians can employ to achieve that goal, including:

• using information literacy as a model for educational reform through process-based pedagogies such as research-based learning and inquiry-based learning,
• collaborating with faculty to create authentic assessments of information literacy, and
• designing assessments that identify the library's contributions to student learning and student success.

At the end of this workshop, participants will have:

• A basic understanding of the potential of information literacy as a model for educational reform.
• Insight into process-based pedagogies that place information literacy at the center.
• Knowledge of how to design assessments that measure the library's contributions to student learning and student success.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Debra Gilchrist
Dean, Libraries and Media Services, Pierce College Library, USA

Christina Tovoté
Pedagogical Developer, Stockholm University Library, Sweden

Information Literacy (IL) is today widely acknowledged in higher education. Important research into its impact on students¿ learning is being conducted mainly in Australia, USA and UK. In Europe, the Bologna Process focuses on lifelong students, their employability and need for transferable skills, of which IL is one. However, itthere is still a long way to go before IL is embedded in all academic courses on different levels.

Who¿s job is it then? This lecture will emphasize the integration of IL in the curriculum. This calls for cooperation between teachers, librarians and IT pedagogues. Their different competences are a big advantage when trying to meet the demand for skilled, efficient and employable students in academic and life careers.

Learning outcomes for Information Literacy are therefore important. How do we describe them so that they are recognizable? In the session participants will be asked to form small groups, discuss and write down IL learning outcomes. An evidence based impact research overview will also be presented: the Stockholm University project "Does it make a difference? Impacts of University Libraries¿ Courses in Information Literacy - Are They Measurable?".

The lecture will briefly introduce some recent Nordic, European and international initiatives and trends of interest:

• NordINFOLIT, a Nordic Forum for Information Literacy initiated in Sweden 2001 with three tracks: a pedagogical summer school for librarians, IL seminars, and the international conference Creating Knowledge held every second year
• IFLA, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions with its special Section on Information Literacy
• The High Level Coloquium on IL gathering international experts in Alexandria, Egypt November 2005 with teams from all over the world and resulting in a final proclamation for governments
• EFIL, European Forum for Information Literacy, established in Madrid in October 2007 as an initiative by the European team in the process from HLC Alexandria towards a world congress.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Christina Tovoté
Pedagogical Developer, Stockholm University Library, Sweden

Debra Gilchrist
Dean, Libraries and Media Services, Pierce College Library, USA

There are two agencies on a typical university of college campus that can be catalysts for transforming the teaching and learning matrix in significant ways --- the library and the faculty development center. When the two agencies collaborate, watch out!

Historically, library faculty have been very supportive of teaching faculty's efforts. The campus library has always been a service center supporting the academic endeavour. As the world of information has been expanding, functions and relationships have had to make constant and significant adjustments.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Debra Gilchrist
Dean, Libraries and Media Services, Pierce College Library, USA

Martin Lewis
Director of Library Services and University Librarian, The University of Sheffield, Western Bank Library, UK

The University of Sheffield opened its ¿33M Information Commons (IC) in 2007. This iconic new 11,500 m2 building, targeted primarily at undergraduate students, complements existing libraries and provides a configuration of services that is unique among the UK's larger research-led universities. As well as looking briefly at the design and operation of the IC, we'll use it as a case study and departure point for discussing the following topics:

• The new partnership - Can new learning spaces influence the development of pedagogy in the academy? And can librarians? The University Library's new partnership initiative aims at delivering more productive engagement between the Library academic staff and students in relation to learning, and is a cornerstone of its current Strategic Plan.
• The hybrid library (revisited) - An old idea, but how does the availability of digital content influence the planning of new library buildings? And how does the print collection feature in library estates strategy?
• Learning space taxonomy - What types of spaces does the modern student library need?
• The Library is the laboratory of the humanities ...and other misconceptions - Can the student library be a laboratory for learning development?
• Lost in space - Why we're usually wrong about what the future will be like. Lessons for the design of learning space.
• Rhiannon's story - Developing a client brief for an unconventional building.
• Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a library? - Professional turf wars around learning spaces, and the operational partnership that manages the IC.
• Twenty-first century icon or dinosaur? - What are the architectural conclusions from the IC? Is this the end of the road for large-scale buildings for independent learning in higher education? Or a new beginning? We'll look at early indications from usage patterns of the Information Commons.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Martin Lewis
Director of Library Services and University Librarian, The University of Sheffield, Western Bank Library, UK

Dr. Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian, Ghent University Library, Belgium

Module 5b: Put Yourself in the DRIVER's Seat - Practical Training for Building a European Repository Network

Jola Prinsen
Manager Ticer, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, The Netherlands

Norbert Lossau
Director, Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

Twelve partners from ten European countries joined in the EC-funded DRIVER project, to connect and network more than 200 physically distributed institutional repositories to one, large-scale, virtual Knowledge Base of European research.

DRIVER is preparing for the future expansion and upgrade of the Digital Repository infrastructure across and outside Europe. Ultimately, repositories from all European countries should be included. DRIVER is also seeking early collaboration with international repository providers from other continents, including the United States, Latin America, Asia and Africa.

By joining the DRIVER community, research institutions all over the world can become part of a state-of-the-art community-drive infrastrcture. Norbert Lossau, scientific coordinator of the project, provides an overview of what the benefits are of becoming part of the DRIVER community. He focuses on the project achievements and lays out a strategy on the future information infrastructure based on open access repositories. He also puts DRIVER into the context of other infrastructure initiatives (like the European Digital Library) and discusses the overall role for libraries.

After the session, participants should have a clear idea of what DRIVER is and what the benefits of joining the DRIVER network can be for their parent institution. DRIVER is a community. Through the collaboration and enthusiasm of many different partners DRIVER makes institutional research output visible and accessible in a global knowledge base. Libraries work together to make Open Access to knowledge a reality - who wouldn't want to support this generic task for libraries in an online world?

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Norbert Lossau
Director, Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

Wolfram Horstmann
CIO Scholarly Information at Bielefeld University, Bielefeld University Library, Germany

Research libraries are increasingly exposing institutional research output. Digital repositories are instruments for doing this. DRIVER is providing an infrastructure for repositories at an international scale.

Local repositories can contribute to DRIVER by providing their content. Different from conventional aggregators DRIVER is not only providing a search service for these contents but building an "open information space": other aggregators and service providers shall be able to "plug" in to the infrastructure, re-use the open information space and build their own services on top of that.

This requires local repositories to go beyond mere technical compliance (e.g. OAI-PMH) and to have a second look what data they are exposing to the web, and how. For textual resources, for example, DRIVER has issued guidelines that support a sustainable and robust, automated operation of an open information space. It will be explained what the steps for the registration as a data provider are, why data quality matters and what the benefits for the local repository are.

DRIVER also offers recipes for building new services and integrating existing services, among them regional, national or thematic content aggregators, search services, recommender systems or personalization functions. The basic principles of these recipes will be laid out.

At the end of this lecture, participants will have an understanding of the scope of DRIVER application scenarios and will be prepared for hands-on experience.

Paper, slides and ecommended reading

Wolfram Horstmann
CIO Scholarly Information at Bielefeld University, Bielefeld University Library, Germany

Dr. Paolo Manghi
DRIVER Project Software Architect, National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Information Science and Technology (ISTI), Italy

Drs. Maurice Vanderfeesten
Project Coordinator DRIVER, SURFfoundation, The Netherlands

The DRIVER Repository Infrastructure maintains a uniform, sustainable Information Space of Open Access publications harvested from (potentially heterogeneous) OAI-PMH repositories in Europe. The result is freely accessible by any research community willing to offer a customized search portal of Open Access publications to its researchers.

The infrastructure's architecture consists of a dynamic set of services orchestrated by a set of infrastructural core services, which are run and maintained by DRIVER staff. These services (ranging from OAI-PMH validator tools to services for data harvesting, cleaning and indexing services) can be used and shared by communities to construct their own Information Spaces and search portals.

Maurice Vanderfeesten will give a demonstration how to join this infrastructure. You will learn how your repository can be harvested by DRIVER and how you have to provide your (meta)data. Maurice will pay special attention to the DRIVER validator service, which provides participants bug reports and the degree of interoperability of your repository with DRIVER.

Paolo Manghi will provide participants with a tour of the core services, showing them the beating heart of the infrastructure. You will get technical background information about how the data is aggregated, stored, indexed and presented in DRIVER Information Space.

At the end of the session, participants will have insight in the whole workflow cycle before a repository will be visible in the DRIVER front-end. Moreover, they will really have experienced how the DRIVER environment/infrastructure works.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Dr. Paolo Manghi
DRIVER Project Software Architect, National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Information Science and Technology (ISTI), Italy

Drs. Maurice Vanderfeesten
Project Coordinator DRIVER, SURFfoundation, The Netherlands

Norbert Lossau
Director, Goettingen State and University Library, Germany