NOTE:
Remember, if anybody wants an autograph for their copy of my book, Net Effects: How Librarians Can Manage the Unintended Consequences of the Internet, http://marylaine.com/book/index.html, e-mail me and I'll tell you how you can get the message you want, inscribed on a paste-in-able slip of paper with my ExLibris caricature on it.
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GURU INTERVIEW, PART II: RODDY MACLEOD
Q: Presumably, you became involved in EEVL, one of
those gateways, because it involved traditional librarian skills in an online environment?
A: Yes. I’ve managed EEVL since 1996, when it was one of
three subject gateways developed under the eLib Programme.
Since then it has become part of the Resource Discovery Network
(RDN), a collaborative UK effort, which now consists of eight Hubs.
Q: How do you see gateways developing in the future?
A: I see very little future for ‘stand-alone’ gateways in the
future, and they must move on if they are to build upon their
foundations and continue to help people exploit good quality
electronic resources. Some gateways which have concentrated
exclusively on cataloguing or listing Internet resources, such as
EELS and ICE, have already ceased. Gateways, which rely on a
considerable amount of human input, are very expensive to
maintain, and the purses of funding bodies are not bottomless.
Q: So, do you see yourself moving on to something else?
A: Not at all. I see a very exciting future for EEVL, but not as
a simple gateway. Very early on, we saw EEVL as something that could be more than just a gateway with an Internet Resource Catalogue
(IRC). In fact, our first service was a newsgroup subject archive,
and we’ve added various other services over the years, such as the
Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM) bibliographic database.
But the future for EEVL, I believe, now lies in utilizing resources in a different way. The future lies in providing aggregated access to information of various types on a subject basis. The information
resources themselves will come from both the public and the
hidden Web.
Q: Why do you see them developing in that way?
A: Services such as EEVL contain details of thousands of
extremely useful resources, but often a searchable and browsable
IRC doesn’t allow these resources to be fully exploited. It can take
a fair amount of effort, and also an understanding of the concept of
an IRC, for users to discover and collate the resources of particular
relevance at any one time. Training users is not the solution,
because there are so many of them, and so few of us, and a good
service should, in any case, be easy to use.
There is definitely a need for resource discovery services, beyond
what Google offers, as was shown recently by the tremendous
interest in Turbo10. There is also a need for subject-based
services, because the information needs of different subject
communities varies so much. ‘One size fits all’ is not the perfect
solution.
Q: How does subject-based aggregation work?
A: If you analyse the most popular sites in EEVL’s IRC you
can see that, for example, there are numerous bibliographic and full
text databases; there are also several excellent trade journals sites
providing industry news; there are some big recruitment agencies
giving job announcements; there are different sites giving
event/conference details; and so on. Though all can be located
from EEVL’s IRC, if you know where to look, users still need to
visit each site in turn to locate relevant information. EEVL’s
harvested full text search engines provide a little more in depth
indexing, but they are still rather hit or miss. Using protocols such as RSS, OAI-PMH and Z39.50 we intend to aggregate metadata
content of different kinds, on a subject basis, and provide cross-
searching capabilities as well.
Much of this information itself is freely available, but there is plenty which is not. Through one-step authentication and profiling we will facilitate aggregated access to subscription-based services as well, and to complete the picture we’re developing personalisation
services. So, the end-product will allow easy discovery of, for
example, news items from numerous different publishers, or job
vacancies from several recruitment agencies, or bibliographic
information and full text from numerous different publishers,
including subscription services, delivered via the one Web site, or if so desired via email alerts.
We will aggregate the metadata, and allow users to discover
relevant items from numerous publishers and content providers, but
the content itself will still be retrieved via the publishers’ own sites.
As a not-for-profit organisation, which is not in competition with any publisher, we are in an ideal position to do this work, and, in effect, drive traffic to the publishers’ sites.
Q: Won’t cross-searching of multi-databases result in
rather crude functionality?
A: To some extent, yes. Where those databases are
complex, we will only be able to offer ‘lowest common denominator’
cross-searching. For full functionality, users will always need to
visit the database provider’s own site. But much end-user
searching is, in any case, relatively crude. On the other hand,
where the target databases are less sophisticated, cross-searching
of metadata works well.
Q: Will the resulting service be very complicated?
A: It won’t work unless its easy to use, and it won’t work
unless the search process and results are very transparent. There
are big interface design issues that need solving, and we are
working on these just now. I’m confident that it can be done.
Q: Will all of this be freely available to anyone?
A: It will be free, apart from access to subscription services,
which will only be available to those whose institutions have
subscribed.
We recently published an RSS primer, to encourage publishers
and content providers to release their metadata via RSS. This work
was funded by JISC. Already we’ve got several engineering
publishers on board and very shortly we’ll be making One-Step
Industry News, and One-Step Job Announcement services
available. These free services will aggregate content and will be
the first stage in the longer process of developing the complete
picture I’ve been talking about.
Q: Earlier you told me about Africa. Do you manage to travel much nowadays through your work?
A: EEVL’s promotional budget is, sadly, very small, and we
prefer to use it to target UK academics. However, Pearson
Education sponsored my trip to Beijing last year, to speak at a
conference. China is developing at an incredible rate, especially in
the engineering and IT sectors. There are good engineering Web
sites there that are untapped by the West, and we are currently
negotiating with an institution in Beijing to enter some sample
records into EEVL to test the market.
Q: Are you involved in any other things?
A: With Jim Corlett, who has contributed to EEVL for many
years, I’m editing a new edition of a book “Information sources in
engineering” to be published by Saur.
[end of self-interview]
Marylaine: A couple more questions that I routinely ask people:
I know that to a large extent you can keep up with what's going on in
the profession just with the items people send you for the newsletter, but are there sources you read regularly to keep up (or just because they're interesting)?
A: I used to have quite a long list of such sources. Some of them
disappeared, and I now no longer go through anything on a
systematic basis. I don't want to be just repeating what is being
announced elsewhere, so its probably just as well that I don't have
time to be more systematic.
I do try to check ResourceShelf regularly, and when I have
something from EEVL to announce, I'll look through the sources I'm
sending the PR to for items for IRN. I'm a member of many
JISCmail lists, and discussions on these throw up many resources
of interest.
Marylaine: Are there new developments you're following with interest? If so, who do you trust for information on them?
A: I'm interested in how Blogs are developing. I'm very taken with the site Bloglines and in particular with My Bloglines, and will be
running an item on that site in the next IRN. RSS is also a current interest, and also anything to do with portals, and also marketing of electronic resources.
With all of these things, I think its necessary to look at who is
producing the information, and why they are producing it. I trust
academic sources, but I think its also important to keep an eye on
commercial sources, as it is often possible to learn from them.
An example of this would be Engineeringtalk. Engineeringtalk is a
product news release service. Its not unique in that respect, but
the way that it generates reports for the producers of press
releases is extremely impressive. I have sent a handful of press
releases to Engineeringtalk about EEVL, and now, each month, I
get an email report telling me how many people have read those
releases each month at the Engineeringtalk site, how many people
subsequently clicked on the links and came to EEVL, and how
many 'sales leads' there were (people requesting more information).
Engineeringtalk may be very much based in the commercial world,
but many of its methods could be applied to academic information
services. The same can often be said about marketing. Its
possible to learn from the commercial world when marketing
information services - of course, marketing methods should not just
be copied from the commercial world into academia, they need to
be adapted to suit academia, but often its possible to get ideas
from commerce.
Marylaine: Roddy, thank you for taking the time to tell us more about your work.
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COOL QUOTE:
Information that seekers seem to think they find serendipitously actually has an organized, purposeful structure created by professionals who use a variety of standards, systems and rules meant to bring order out of chaos.
Suzanne Pilsk, "Organizing Corporate Knowledge," Information Outlook, April, 2002. Quoted in Revolting Librarians Redux.
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