From information gateway to digital library management system: a case analysis

From information gateway to digital library managementsystem: a case analysis

Karen Calhoun

107D Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

Abstract

This paper discusses the design, implementation and evolution of the Cornell University LibraryGateway using the case analysis method. It diagnoses the Gateway within the conceptual frameworkof definitions and best practices associated with information gateways, portals, and emerging digitallibrary management systems, in particular the product ENCompass. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. Allrights reserved.

Keywords: Information gateways; Portals; Digital library management systems; Metadata; Cornell UniversityLibrary Gateway; ENCompass

1. Introduction

Using the case analysis method, this paper sets forth the facts and organizational circum-stances surrounding the design, implementation, and evolution of the Cornell UniversityLibrary Gateway—the networked information space that presents the Library’s collections,digital assets, Web sites, and services to its users (http://campusgw.library.cornell.edu/). Thepurpose of the case analysis is to expose a broad set of issues, decisions and alternativesassociated with building the Gateway and watching it change over time. Such an exercise canbe expected to help those who are designing their own organization’s networked informationspaces.

The paper first lays out a conceptual framework of definitions and best practices reportedin selected current literature on information gateways, portals, and digital library manage-ment systems. It then offers a diagnosis of the Library’s evolving networked informationspace through the lens of that framework. My primary intent in writing is to exchange ideas

E-mail address: [email protected] (K. Calhoun).

Pergamon

Library Collections, Acquisitions,& Technical Services 26 (2002) 141–150

1464-9055/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S1464-9055(02)00226-9

and experiences of possible value to other librarians who are implementing informationdiscovery and management systems.

2. Background and definitions

For more than a decade, libraries have been responding to dramatic shifts in library users’preferences and expectations for obtaining information and services. Like it or not, librarieshave been faced with the fact that the Internet greatly lowers the opportunity costs ofobtaining information; and in the name of convenience, more and more users bypass thelibrary’s resources in favor of the results they can get with an ordinary Internet search engine,even though these results are of questionable quality. The principal challenge for libraries hasbeen to rapidly innovate to select, organize and successfully deliver high quality Web-basedcontent, served up through easy-to-use information discovery and management systems.

Libraries have been experimenting with a number of models for information systems toserve up Internet-based content. These are information gateways, portals, and what somelibrary professionals are calling “digital library management systems.”

2.1. Information gateways

DESIRE (Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Educa-tion), an European Union funded project that ran from July 1998 until June 2000, focused oncollaboration between project partners at ten institutions to enhance existing Europeaninformation networks. The project produced an excellent handbook for libraries and otherorganizations establishing information gateways on the Internet [1]. There are many ways todefine “information gateways,” but the DESIRE handbook’s definition is particularly thor-ough and helpful as a model. The handbook defines “information gateways” as quality-controlled information services that offer [1] online links to other Internet sites or documents;[2] selection of resources via an intellectual process, within a pre-defined collection scope;[3] intellectually-produced content descriptions, preferably with keywords or controlledterminology; [4] an intellectually-constructed structure for browsing; and [5] at least partiallymanually-created metadata for individual resources. The purpose of an information gatewayof this type is to help a community of users discover high quality, relevant Web-basedinformation quickly and effectively.

2.2. Portals

While there is no single definition of a portal, a helpful description was provided byHoward Strauss, Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University and an experton the Web and higher education. Strauss presented a detailed look at portals, elements thatmight appear on them, and how they differ from home pages in a CREN (Corporation forResearch and Educational Networking) Tech Talk [2].

Strauss defines a portal as a special kind of gateway to Web resources—“a hub from

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which users can locate all the Web content they commonly need.” In describing how portalsdiffer from a set of Web pages tied to a home page, one commentator in the Tech Talk said“a portal is user-centric, while a home page is owner-centric”—in other words, the sitedesign is built around some target community of users, rather than around the organizationthat hosts or “owns” the site. Elements that might appear on portals include access to variouskinds of data (often arranged into “channels”), a search box, links, calendars or schedules,e-mail or address books, discussion groups or chat, and support for collaborative activities(for example, shared work space).

By Strauss’ definition, portals are customized to the role of the user who connects to theportal. For example, a student or visitor to the portal might be able to connect to a limitednumber of channels, might be prevented from entering faculty members’ shared work spaces,and so on. Portals also feature personalization—for example, the ability to change theposition of channels on the page or to create a personal profile for current awareness services.

Strauss discussed horizontal and vertical portals. An example of a horizontal portal isYahoo—a source of extremely broad, but generally shallow content that a searcher can useto find anything they want on the Web. A university or library would be more likely to builda vertical portal, to focus on a specific community of users, and further to customize thatview to different groups within that community, like students or a group of scholars in adiscipline. An example is UCLA’s Humanities Web Portal [3]. Another example of a verticalportal supports the project teams working on the National Science Digital Library (NSDL),funded by the National Science Foundation [4].

Within the library world, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and other partnersare pursuing the definition of a “scholar’s portal”—a vertical portal to facilitate in-depthresearch and to make sense of the Web for scholars, including exposing the highest quality,most dependable content and permitting cross-collection searching [5,6]. Other proposedfeatures of the scholar’s portal include virtual reference services, shared workspaces, tools tofacilitate scholarly publishing, cross-platform access to commercial databases, and electronicthesauri adapted to the vocabularies of various academic specialties.

2.3. Digital library management systems

University libraries provide a home for a bewildering and rapidly growing set of digitalassets, such as electronic books and journals, locally-produced databases, citation indexes,digitized texts and images, collections of digitized photographs, and sound and videoarchives. It has become critical to systematically manage these assets in a way that bringsthem together logically and conveniently for use. Within a university library, it is highlydesirable to do this in a way that also supports the discovery and use of the library’s rich printcollections. A digital library management system can achieve these goals.

To understand more about the problem an effective digital library management system isintended to solve, consider the case of Library X. This hypothetical library has an onlinecatalog containing records for about four million titles, mostly print. In addition, the librarylicenses about twenty thousand e-titles—including e-journals and e-books, online indexes,

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and numeric data files. Its bibliographers have selected several thousand important Websites—especially ones valuable to area studies, a specialty of this library—that are freelyavailable to the public. Its digital project staff have created a number of digitized texts,images, video and sound files, and finding aids. All of these resources are lying scatteredacross the library’s Web pages, and the library desperately wants to unify its rich printresources, digital assets, and licensed and free Web-accessible content in an integratedrepository—and make them all searchable through one interface.

Recently, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) convened a group whosework is highly relevant to those with an interest in digital library management systems. Thegroup’s “Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections” explores criteriafor digital collections, objects, metadata, and projects [7]. The writers define a collection ofdigital objects as “a selected and organized set of digital [objects] along with the metadatathat describes them and at least one interface that gives access to them.” Requirements fora good collection include: [1] an explicit collection development policy (the DESIREhandbook emphasizes this point also); [2] a description of the collection giving the nature,scope, and any restrictions on use; [3] sustainability over time—that is ongoing maintenanceof the collection; and [4] intellectual property rights management and security.

The IMLS framework further states principles for “good” digital objects (e-books andarticles, Word files, databases, Web sites, image files, etc.) and for “good” metadata. Goodobjects are digitized, named, and described according to accepted standards or best practices,because doing so provides the foundation for discovering, reusing, repackaging, exchanging,and building services on these assets.

People use metadata to describe, manage, and disseminate information about books andjournals (the best known metadata system is perhaps a library catalog), personal researchcollections (like a set of slides), databases (like a numeric file), Web sites (like a departmenthome page), and even university courses. Good metadata makes collections and objectsdiscoverable, accessible, manageable, and usable. The most common metadata categories—there are others—are descriptive (helps users find and evaluate objects), administrative(helps manage intellectual property rights and preserve collections over time), and structural(helps to identify and retrieve sections of an object, such as pages of a book). Metadata iswonderful.

The trouble with metadata is its diversity. There are hundreds, even thousands of metadatatypes that have been used to describe the Web-accessible digital assets that are distributedaround the world. Even in a single university environment, it is not practical or advisable todemand that those who publish or organize Web content utilize a single campus-widemetadata “standard.”

While there are a number of tried and true metadata systems and standards, and there area variety of published metadata schemes, there are also many collection-specific, locallydeveloped metadata schemes in use. To achieve unified access to the widely distributed,variously described digital assets that are typically held within a university library, so that asingle search can bring appropriate resources together, requires metadata interoperability.

Further, users of Web resources have come to expect seamless linking between digitalassets of all types—links from citation databases to catalogs and the full text of articles, linksfrom citations in articles to the cited articles, links from images to critiques of those images,


and more [8,9]. Work is underway to make this kind of seamless navigation—called“reference linking”—a reality in digital library management systems.

3. The case of the Cornell University Library Gateway

The Cornell University Library Gateway (http://library.cornell.edu/) is meant to be thecommon entryway to the networked resources, services and information that the Libraryprovides for its users. The strategic intent of its introduction in January 1998 was to bring toan end years of confusion for Library users. Before the Gateway’s launch, different Cornelllibraries (there are 19 of them) provided different ways to connect to different subsets ofwhat the Library offered. The objectives of the Gateway project were to create a unified,identifiable Library Web site; to provide one-stop shopping for information about the Libraryand its services; to build one database of metadata to connect users to a carefully selectedcollection of free and proprietary networked resources; and to mainstream and coordinate theprocesses for database creation and support. Full details of the strategies, staffing, andprocesses underlying the Gateway’s implementation are reported elsewhere [10], as is anevaluation of the Gateway’s performance, from a user’s perspective [11].

The Gateway is made up of two principal parts—a home page, which functions as theLibrary’s home page, and the Gateway database (now called the “E-Reference Collection”),which is database of metadata about selected networked resources [12]. The metadatapermits discovery of, then connection to, appropriate networked resources. User interactionis encouraged through a number of “Ask a Librarian” e-mail links, which appear on all of theGateway pages.

The Gateway database uses MySQL, a popular Open Source database [13], running on aUnix platform. The search engine used for indexing and searching is Glimpse [14]. Net-worked resources that are selected for the Gateway database are cataloged in the Library’sVoyager catalog and the MARC catalog records are then transferred to the Gateway andaugmented with authentication and authorization information (if use of the resource islimited to the Cornell community). The Gateway database can be browsed by subjectcaptions or searched by keyword. The Gateway has been a tremendous success. In the firstmonth after launch, usage (that is, connections to the Gateway home page URL) wasaveraging about 21,500 hits per day. In calendar year 2001, usage was averaging close to138,000 hits per day (it should be noted we are not sure exactly what this number means).For the Gateway database of networked resources, there were a little more than 12,000successful connections to these resources in the first month after implementation—in 2001,the monthly average was well over 55,000 connections [15].

In spite of its success the Gateway has been far from immune to the constant state of fluxthat is typical of today’s information systems. The first major evolutionary change was theintroduction of a searchable help system, with an interface organized according to userpreferences [16]. The second was the introduction of a proxy server, used to provide accessto Cornell-licensed networked resources when they are being accessed from Internet ServiceProviders other than the one provided by Cornell itself (i.e., AOL, Roadrunner, etc.).

The third substantive evolutionary change to the Gateway was the introduction of per-


sonalized services, in the form of MyLibrary [17]. Even at the point of first introduction,when the Gateway database contained 960 titles, we kept hearing that users found searchingthe Gateway database complex and overwhelming. They said they wanted a way to create apersonally relevant library and to be informed of new resources of interest to them. AtCornell, MyLibrary has two main services—MyLinks and MyUpdates. MyLinks allows auser from the Cornell community to collect, organize and maintain his or her own links toe-resources from the Gateway or anywhere on the Web. MyUpdates supports currentawareness.

The next evolutionary change to the Gateway resulted, once more, from problems withsearching and browsing the Gateway database. By early 2001, the database containedapproximately 5,000 networked resource titles (a five-fold increase since its first implemen-tation) [18]. While the database was still highly useful, retrieval sets were becomingunwieldy and confusing, largely because narrowly focused resources like the “Americans &Food Quiz” were retrieved alongside very broad, reference resources like AGRICOLA. ALibrary committee investigated the options and recommended that the Gateway database beredefined to give prominence to networked resources of significant reference value [19]. Thiswas done, and the Gateway database became the present E-Reference Collection. At thatpoint, support for searching and connecting to e-journals was removed from the Gatewaydatabase (they can still be located via the Library online catalog). Considerably smaller oncemore, the E-Reference Collection currently contains 865 networked resources, and referenceselectors have primary responsibility for decisions governing additions to the database [20].

Currently, Library staff are working to resolve three key issues: the first is related toinadequate discovery and access mechanisms to the e-journals accessible to the Cornellcommunity. Library users want a Web-accessible, comprehensive list of e-journals availableto members of the Cornell community, and they want metadata for all e-journals in theLibrary online catalog (the Library has access to over 16,000 titles in 70 aggregations, plusan unknown number of additional titles that it has licensed and/or cataloged separately) [21].Users and public services librarians are continually asking for a more reliable, easier way todetermine what e-journals the library holds; it is clear that librarians must optimize useraccess to these high-demand resources if they are to provide adequate service [22].

The second key issue is the redesign and updating of the Gateway, since it is felt thatneither the Library home page nor the rest of the Gateway pages reflect state-of-the-art Webdesign or functionality. The Library wants to update the Gateway pages by the start of thefall 2002 semester [23]. Because it is the front door to the Library—and for some users whorarely or never visit our buildings, the Gateway is the Library—it is essential that theGateway be appealing and easy to use. As the Gateway has grown, collections and servicesare increasingly buried and difficult to find, and it is a constant struggle to keep the pagesuncluttered, yet deliver important news, content, and innovations.

The third key issue has to do with the Library’s rising number of digital assets, each usingdifferent methods and metadata formats to support resource discovery and management.Despite the great strides represented by the Gateway, the Library continues to offer its usersa confusing array of digital assets and delivery systems. In other words, we need a digitallibrary management system.


4. ENCompass at Cornell

About two years ago, the Cornell University Library entered into a development partner-ship with Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. to build ENCompass [24], which is a digitallibrary management system. Only a handful of vendors offer anything comparable [25]. Inaddition, the University of Virginia Library has been collaborating with Cornell’s DigitalLibrary Research Group (part of the Computer Science department) to implement FEDORA(Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). FEDORA is a system archi-tecture for managing digital objects and building interoperable repositories. The intent is tocreate a non-proprietary digital library management system [26].

ENCompass addresses the issues of cross-collection searching and metadata diversity. Itpromises a solution to managing the Library’s rising number of digital collections, each ofwhich uses different interfaces and metadata formats to support resource discovery andmanagement. In addition, since the collections are linked from a variety of pages deep withinthe Gateway’s many pages, users cannot easily find these collections, even if they know thecollections’ names.

In addition to its potential to offer unified access to the widely distributed, variouslydescribed digital assets that are held by the Library, an advantage of ENCompass is itssupport for deep searching (in other words, a searcher can be led to an appropriate collectionwith a very narrow search). For example, in a cross-collection searching system that permitsdeep searching, assuming a searcher has an interest in images of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks (atype of bird), he or she might enter the search “rose-breasted grosbeak” and be led not onlyto an appropriate resource—Cornell’s Fuertes Image Database—but also directly to theimages of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks within that database.

Other ENCompass development partners are Kansas State University, the Getty ResearchLibrary, and the University of Pennsylvania. The partners help with system design as wellas suggest and test improvements. The ENCompass team at Cornell is currently working onthree collections–a set of 10,000 digitized pamphlets from the Samuel May Anti-SlaveryCollection, the E-Reference Collection, and the Library online catalog.

The first releases of the ENCompass software have provided support for nonproprietarydata. Release 2.0, due in early 2002, is to provide support for proprietary resources–that is,commercial journal and reference databases and other e-content. The 2.0 release alsoincludes support for reference linking [27]. Reference linking would allow a searcher tomove from citation index entries directly to the full-text articles in the cited journals that theLibrary has licensed.

While the Library is not yet in production with ENCompass at Cornell, the team has beenworking with integrating our Library catalog for cross searching with other digital collec-tions. The metadata types are diverse–for example, the E-Reference Collection uses a locallycreated metadata format (based on MARC); the Anti-Slavery Collection uses TEILite; andthe catalog uses MARC. Using the tools provided by ENCompass, the team is mixing andmapping the metadata for these collections in a single integrated system for discovery andaccess [28].


5. Discussion

Cornell’s Gateway conforms well to the DESIRE definition of an information gateway. Itsevolution to date has been driven by the needs to provide 24 � 7 guidance for effectivelyusing the Gateway (the help system), to make it widely available on and off campus (theproxy server), to personalize it (MyLibrary), and to finely tune the scope of the Gatewaydatabase (the E-Reference Collection).

While the Gateway is primarily an information gateway organized around its owner, theCornell University Library, rather than around categories of Library users, it also has severaltraits of a vertical portal, most notably in the form of the personalization offered byMyLibrary and the interaction offered by the “Ask a Librarian” links. In addition, theGateway’s numerous links to “about” information, to hours and calendars, library-affiliatedWeb sites, and services like ILL or course reserves are the kinds of links one might find ona vertical portal.

While it offers a loose federation of a variety of Cornell-affiliated digital assets, today’sGateway is clearly not a digital library management system. Its collection of digital assets islimited to those described in the E-Reference Collection, the Library catalog, and onnumerous Web pages, all of which must be discovered and searched separately; the Gatewaylacks the means to integrate diverse metadata for unified searching; and it does not supportcross-collection searching or reference linking. However, we expect the next step for theGateway will be to evolve toward digital library management. Cornell’s implementation ofENCompass could support resource discovery at a new, much more robust level, and acrossa range of digital assets and metadata types. At the same time, a digital library managementsystem is not the same as a portal. As it continues to evolve, the Gateway will need to blendthe features of digital library management system, information gateway, and portal.

An emerging issue on some university campuses is the relationship between the library’sWeb presence (gateway, portal, or hybrid), campus portals, and/or learning managementsystems. For example, some are asking what belongs on the library site and what belongs onthe campus portal. This is an area to watch.

The best practices presented in this paper and the Library’s experiences with its Gatewaysuggest that bringing order out of the chaos of Web-based resources, on behalf of a particularorganization or group of users, is a resource-intensive enterprise. At the same time, it isunnecessary for every organization to build something as cost-intensive as the Library’sGateway. Smaller quantities of resources tend to demand lower levels of technology, andthere are broad ranges of alternatives that can lead to satisfactory results. The literature oflibrary science offers several examples of considerably less costly but effective informationgateway/portal implementations, for example, at the Duke University Music Library [29] andthe University of Wyoming Libraries [30].

Mindful of the importance of developing what we might call today “an Americanknowledge base,” Thomas Jefferson said in an 1823 letter “ . . . it is the duty of every goodcitizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating tothe history of our country” [31]. While producing and preserving a knowledge base isfundamental, a coherent system for discovering, accessing, and navigating such a knowledgebase is equally important. This case analysis of the Cornell University Library Gateway


indicates the Library is far from producing the optimal networked information system.Nevertheless, given the importance of the Web to the way a university community learns,teaches, works, and creates new knowledge, it is critical for libraries to be successful inbuilding such systems.

References

[1] DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook at http://www.desire.org/handbook.[2] Strauss H. What is a portal, anyway? CREN (Corporation for Research, and Educational Networking) Tech

Talk, January 20, 2000, at http://www.cren.net/know/techtalk/events/portals.html.[3] UCLA humanities web portal home page, at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/.[4] National science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education digital library communication portal,

at http://comm.nsdlib.org/.[5] Campbell JD. The case for creating a scholars portal to the web: a white paper. Portal: libraries, and the

academy 1, no. 1 (January 2001), 15–21. Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/pla/.[6] ARL scholars working group report, May 2001, at http://www.arl.org/access/scholarsportal/

may01rept.html.[7] Institute of Museum, and Library Services. A framework of guidance for building good digital collections,

2001?, at http://www.imls.gov/pubs/forumframework.htm.[8] Van de Sompel H, Hochstenbach P. Reference linking in a hybrid library environment, pts. 1, and 2, D-Lib

Magazine 5, no. 4 (April.), at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/04contents.html, 1999.[9] Caplan P. Reference linking for journal articles: promise, progress, and perils. Portal: Libraries, and the

Academy 1 2001;3:351–6.[10] Calhoun KS, Koltay Z, Weissman E. Library gateway: project design, teams, and cycle time. Library

Resources, and Technical Services 1999;43(2)114–22.[11] Koltay Z, Calhoun, K. Designing for WOW! The optimal information gateway. In Racing toward tomorrow:

proceedings of the ninth national conference of the association of college, and research libraries, April 8–11.(Chicago: ACRL). Available at http://www.ala.org/acrl/koltay.pdf, 1999.

[12] E-reference collection: select the link from the library gateway at http://library.cornell.edu/.[13] MySQL, at http://www.mysql.com.[14] Glimpse, at http://webglimpse.org/whatis.html.[15] Calculated from gateway statistics on the Cornell University Library StaffWeb site.[16] Faiks A, Hyland N. Gaining user insight: a case study illustrating the card sorting technique. College, and

Research Libraries 2000;61(4):348–57.[17] A helpful introduction to MyLibrary is Debra Ketchell’s “Too many channels: making sense out of portals,

and personalization.” Information Technology, and Libraries 19, no. 4 (December 2000), 175–179.[18] Weissman E. E-mail response to inquiry from Jean McKenzie of UC Berkeley, January 31, 2001.[19] Cornell University Library. Report from the working group on networked resources access before the

ENCompass Era, March 30, 2001. Internal committee report.[20] Atkinson R. Minutes of the Cornell University Library Collection Development Executive Committee, July

24, 2001. Internal e-mail communication.[21] Weissman E. E-mail message to Cornell University Library listserv IRPC-L, January 24, 2002.[22] For a discussion of issues related to providing access to e-journals in aggregator databases, see Calhoun K,

Kara B. Aggregation or aggravation? Optimizing access to full-text journals. ALCTS Online Newsletter11:1 (Spring 2000). Available: http://www.ala.org/alcts/alcts_news/v11n1/index.html.

[23] Thomas S. E-mail message to Cornell University Library listserv CU-LIB, November 20, 2001.[24] What is ENCompass? at http://encompass.endinfosys.com/whatisENC.htm.


[25] See the information available at the following Web sites for Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, and Luna:“MetaLib,” at http://www.aleph.co.il/metalib/index.html “MAP: Millennium Access Plus,” at http://www.iii.com/html/products/p_map.shtml “Insight Software Systems,” at http://www.luna-imaging.com/in-sight.html.

[26] Staples T, Wayland R. Virginia dons FEDORA: a prototype for a digital object repository. D-Lib Magazine6, no. 7/8 (July/August 2000), at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/07contents.html.

[27] More information is available in the Endeavor brochure LinkFinderPlus, at http://www.endinfosys.com/prods/linkfinderplus.htm.

[28] Calhoun K, Turner T. Mixing, and mapping metadata to provide integrated access to digital librarycollections: an activity report. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative,Tokyo, Japan, October 24–26, 2001. Available at http://www.nii.ac.jp/dc2001/(choose Online Proceedings).

[29] Fineman Y. DW3 classical music resources: managing Mozart on the web. Portal: Libraries, and theAcademy 1 2001;4:383–9.

[30] Nelson ML. Integrated access to library resources. Online 25, no. 2 (March/April 2001), 48–53.[31] Jefferson T. Quoted from a letter to Hugh P. Taylor, October 4, 1823. Available from American Memory’s

“Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress” at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mtjhtml/mtjhome.html.


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From information gateway to digital library management system: a case analysis