Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

How to encode the availability of documents

Since almost a year I work on a simple encoding format and API to just get the current (!) availability status of documents in libraries. Together with Reh Uwe (hebis network) and Anne Christensen (beluga project) we created the Document Availability Information API (DAIA) which is defined as data model with encoding in XML and JSON (whichever you prefer).

This week I finished and published a reference implementation of the DAIA protocol as open source Perl-module at CPAN. The implementation includes a simple DAIA validator and converter. A public installation of this validator is also available. The next tasks include implementing server and client components for several ILS software. Every library has its own special rules and schemas – Jonathan Rochkind already wrote about the problems to implement DAIA because of ILS complexity. We cannot erase this complexity by magic (unless we refactor and clean the ILS), but at least we can try to map it to a common data model – which DAIA provides.

With the DAIA Perl package you can concentrate on writing wrappers from your library systems to DAIA and easily consume and evaluate DAIA-encoded information. Why should everyone write its own routines to grab for instance the HTML OPAC output and parse availability status? One mapping to DAIA should fit most needs, so others can build upon. DAIA can not only be helpful to connect different library systems, but also to create mashups and services like “Show me on a map, where a given book is currently hold and available” or “Send me a tweet if a given books in my library is available again” – If you have more cool ideas for client applications, just let me know!

In the context of ILS Discovery Interface Task Force and their official recommendation DAIA implements the GetAvailability method (section 6.3.1). There are numerous APIs for several tasks in library systems (SRU/SRW, Z39.50, OpenSearch, OAI-PMH, Atom, unAPI etc.) but there was no open, usable standard way just to query whether a copy of given publication – for instance book – is available in a library, in which department, whether you can loan it or only use it in the library, whether you can directly get it online, or how long it will probably take until it is available again (yes, I looked at alternatives like Z39.50, ISO 20775, NCIP, SLNP etc. but they were hardly defined, documented, implemented and usable freely on the Web). I hope that DAIA is easy enough so non-librarians can make use of it if libraries provide an API to their system with DAIA. Extensions to DAIA can be discussed for instance in Code4Lib Wiki but I’d prefer to start with this basic, predefined services:

• presentation: an item can be used inside the institution (in their rooms, in their intranet etc.).
• loan: an item can be used outside of the institution (by lending or online access).
• interloan: an tem can be used mediated by another institution. That means you do not have to interact with the institution that was queried for this item. This include interlibrary loan as well as public online ressources that are not hosted or made available by the queried institution.
• openaccess: an item can be used imediately without any restrictions by the institution, you don’t even have to give it back. This applies for Open Access publications and free copies.

European kind-of-Code4Lib conference

On April 22-24th the European Library Automation Group Conference (ELAG 2009) will take place at the University Library in Bratislava. This is the 33rd ELAG and will be my first. I am happy to see that digital library conferences and developer meetups don’t only take place in the US, hopefully ELAG is like the Code4Lib Conference that takes place at February 23-26th this year for the 4th time – maybe we could have a joint Code4lib Europa / ECDL somtime in the next years? But first “meet us at ELAG 2009“!

Other library-related events in Germany that I will participate in the next month, include 10th Sun Summit Bibliotheken (March 18/19th in Kassel), ISI 2009 (April, 1-3rd in Konstanz), BibCamp 2009 (May, 15-17th in Stuttgart) and the annual Bibliothekartag (June, 2-5th in Erfurt). I am nore sure yet about the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2009, September 27th – Oktober 2nd in Corfu, Greece) – the Call for Contributions is open until March 21st.

Quick overview of Open Access LIS journals

I just stumbled upon the article “Evaluating E-Contents Beyond Impact Factor – A Pilot Study Selected Open Access Journals In Library And Information Science” by Bhaskar Mukherjee (Journal of Electronic Publishing, vol. 10, no. 2, Spring 2007). It contains a detailed analysis of five Open Archive Journals in Library and Information Science, namely Ariadne, D-Lib Magazine, First Monday, Information Research, and Information Technology and Disabilities.

A more comprehensive list of OA journals in the LIS field can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). It currently lists 89 journals. Not all of them are highly relevant and lively so how do you compare? The traditional journal impact factor is oviously rubbish and most journals are not covered anyway. In a perfect world you could easily harvest all articles via OAI-PMH, extract all references via their identifiers and create a citation network of the Open Access world of library science – maybe you should also include some repositories like E-LIS. But maybe you can measure the impact in other ways. Why not including blogs? Instead of laboriously writing a full research paper for JASIST to “evaluate the suitability of weblogs for determining the impact of journals” (ad-hoc title) I quickly used Google Blogsearch to count some links from weblog entries to some journal pages:

First Monday

4,791

D-Lib Magazine

2,366

Ariadne

1,579

Information Research

372

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship

249

Code4Lib Journal

209

Libres

61

Journal of Library and Information Technology

10

I clearly admit that my method is insufficient: you first have to evaluate Google Blogsearch, check URL patterns, divide the number by age or by number of articles etc. Fortunately my blog is not peer-reviewed. But you can comment!

A note on German OA LIS journals: It’s a shame that while German librarians basically read German library journals only two of them are truly Open Access: Beside the more specialized GMS Medizin-Bibliothek-Information there is LIBREAS (with blog count 71). Its current CfP is on a special issue about Open Access and the humanities!

P.S: Why do so many LIS journals use insane and ugly URLs instead of clean and stable ones like http://JOURNALNAME.TDL/ISSUE/ARTICLE? This is like printing a journal on toilet paper! Apache rewrite, virtual hosts, and reverse proxies are there for a good reason.

P.P.S: The IFLA had a Section on Library and Information Science Journals 2002-2005.