European Library Automation Group 2004 Seminar
| Pages | 8-9 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050410567290 |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| Author | Ron Davies |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
European Library Automation Group
2004 Seminar
Ron Davies
8LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 8 2004, pp. 8-9, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050410567290
This year marked the 25th
anniversary of the European Library
Automation Group (ELAG), an
informal association of people involved
in library automation in libraries and
information centres in some 27
different European countries. This 2004
meeting of the Library Systems
Seminar (the 28th of the series) took
place in Trondheim, Norway from June
9-11. The title of the conference was
``Interoperability: new challenges and
solutions'', but it was clear that in the
minds of both organizers and
participants many of the current
challenges of interoperability lie in
library portals. Half of the prepared
papers dealt with some aspect of portal
design or implementation, and several
more touched on issues, such as system
architecture or authentication, that were
clearly relevant to portal applications.
The workshop on library portals also
was by far the most popular, to the
extent that it had to be divided into two
sections to allow seminar attendees to
participate fully in discussions.
Portals
In the main plenary sessions of the
seminar concerning portals, Rosemary
Russell of UKOLN highlighted the
work in the UK on the Subject Portals
Project, which provides a single point
of access to a broad array of resources
by building on the Resource Discovery
Network. Portlets have been used to
integrate subject-based content in
environments like enterprise portals and
will be adapted to the Java portlet
standard and WSRP, the Web Services
for Remote Portlets specification.
Additional work is being done on
testing and refining the user interface.
Ari Rouvari of the National Library of
Finland described how in Finland portal
implementation responsibilities are
shared between the National Library
and other partners, and portal functions
have been categorized as either
centralized or localized with shared
template configurations and interfaces
being copied to local sites before being
modified. His presentation stressed the
need to know who the users of a portal
are so that they can be segmented into
different categories and he described
the authentication methods currently
being used. In contrast to the other
speakers, Mats Herder of LIBRIS in
Sweden voiced some of his fears and
concerns over the future that appears to
be waiting for organizations implementing
a portal. While committed to a national
library portal for Sweden, he struck a
discordant note, musing on the need for
standards, the role of a portal in relation
to a national union catalog, the
complexity that librarians may be
presenting for users (or that they may be
hiding behind the simplicity of the
portal), and the future needs that users
may or may not have for all this
information.
The better part of the morning of the
third day was devoted exclusively to
portals. Representatives of four vendors
of library portal products were asked to
address different aspects of
metasearching and the provision of
information. Tamar Sadeh of ExLibris
discussed the principles and approach
used to re-design the user interface and
workflow of the MetaLib portal in
conjunction with a focus group of some
20 different MetaLib users. Peter Noerr
of MuseGlobal outlined the benefits of
metasearching through a portal, including
single sign on, simple selection of
information resources, consistent results
displays and refinement tools, and one-
click document delivery. However he
also highlighted the on-going challenges,
including supporting multiple protocols
(either proprietary protocols or different
implementations of standard protocols),
differences in semantics, non-standard
record formats, and authentication issues.
Work being undertaken by the NISO
Metasearch Initiative in terms of
metasearch access, metadata standards
and information resource description
holds considerable promise. Jennifer
Gatenby of OCLC PICA spoke about the
role of document delivery in a portal
environment, particularly the way that
portals could provide a gateway to
intelligent inter-library loan services
among participating libraries. (There was
a brief debate on whether these services
made the concept of a union catalog
obsolete, with some participants
defending the union catalogue concept on
the grounds of speed of response, better
ranking and de-duplication of results and
the provision of cataloging copy.)
Finally Mark Carden of Dynix
highlighted the problems that the word
``portal'' presents, in a world where for
many organizations, the university
portal or the enterprise information
portal is the focus of intense
development at the moment. He stressed
the need for librarians to be involved in
enterprise portal development, both to
add value in the organization of
information and to preserve the library's
role in information delivery.
Developments in Norway
Of the formal presentations that did
not deal with portals, many related to
different aspects of information
processing in the host country, Norway.
JanErikKofoedexplainedthehistoryof
the architecture of BIBSYS, the
integrated library system used by the
Norwegian national library, all
Norwegian university and college
libraries and a number of research
libraries. (BIBSYS was also the host for
this year's conference.) He diagrammed
the current five-tiered architecture (user
interaction, presentation, business logic,
data management logic and data store)
using long vertical rectangles for each
layer and drew the comparison with
Norway's 1,000-year-old wooden stave
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