A utopian place of criticism? brokering access to network information

ing and indexing services say which articles are in the world, but they do not typically say where they are or who might provide them. There are no tools which ‘locate’ articles in the library, and, in the absence of widely deployed concise identifiers for journal articles, location is largely a manual process. Automation of this operation would confer many benefits, and will be increasingly necessary in emerging service environments where documents may be sourced from multiple locations (for example, from a resource sharing consortium, from publisher databases, from document suppliers). Depending on the level of indexing employed at a specific database, users wishing to ascertain the potential availability of a required article may need to interact with bibliographic information at three distinct levels : ● article level – the individual article may be indexed with associated holdings information. (An example of this would be a holdings file associated with an electronic document delivery service.); ● issue level – there may be no record for the article, but there may be a record pertaining to the journal issue containing it. Holdings information for the issue may also be available; ● journal title level – the only indication of the existence of the article may be through analysing the holdings summary statement at the journal title level. Depending on the level of indexing and the level of standardisation employed, inter-operability between the discovery and locate functions may be performed in a number of ways: ● The SICI (Serial Item and Contribution Identifier) represents a standardised, concise mechanism for transferring unique identification for both articles and issues between discovery and locate functions (and then onto the request phase). More recently, we have seen the emergence of the Digital Object Identifier [36], an initiative of the Association of American Publishers which may identify an object or some method of acquiring it [13]. ● In the absence of a SICI, the article will be identified to the locate service in some less concise non-standardised unstructured manner (e.g. a citation format). Location services (automated or manual) must then rely on fuzzy matching techniques to equate the request with their own holdings; this may also rely on some intelligent analysis of holdings summary statements. Having ascertained that a particular supplier potentially has the required article, holdings level information may provide the current availability status – this may either be the ‘circulation status’ for physical items or format information for electronically available items. At this point the user may wish to know the choices in terms of availability for the item; this is especially important where multiple potential suppliers are being consulted simultaneously. Again we can identify some impediments in the current environment. The locate function depends on search services, and a name resolution service (which returns bibliographic details for a SICI) or special procedures to match records. JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION vol. 55, no. 1 48 Journal of Documentation, Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1999 © Aslib, The Association for Information Management. All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Aslib, The Association for Information Management Staple Hall, Stone House Court, London EC3A 7PB Tel: +44 (0) 171 903 0000, Fax: +44 (0) 171 903 0011 Email: [email protected], WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/aslib The SICI is not now widely deployed. Holdings data for serial articles are not widely standardised [37]; in fact, in a UK environment, there is considerable diversity of technical and service approaches. Nor are there agreed ways of representing terms and conditions data [38]. 3.3.1.3 Request. The identification of the required item, along with the preferred terms of availability and delivery mechanisms must be passed from the locate to the request process. The request itself must also carry order information (delivery address, billing address etc.) to the supplier. A request transaction may involve many messages passing between requester and supplier since it must cover the entire lifecycle from a request being placed to successful/unsuccessful completion. For inter-operability at the business as well as system level there must be a common understanding of the meaning of these messages and the effect they have on the status of the request. Interesting issues are raised in a heterogeneous physical and electronic document delivery environment where the life span of a request may be anything between milli-seconds and years. A user should be able to query the status of a request at any stage. Furthermore the request may mesh with the exchange of business messages surrounding the transaction. Similar impediments exist here. Request requires an agreed way of transmitting request information. There are a number of ways of doing this, none of which is widely deployed. The ILL protocol and Z39.50 item order extended service are being looked at in several contexts. EDI also has a potential role here but does not seem to have been widely deployed in this context. Several proprietary systems are in use by document suppliers, including the British Library Document Supply Centre. 3.3.1.4 Bringing it together – automating an end-to-end process? The discussion of serials literature is summarised in Figure 5, which outlines user processes or functions and the data entities that support them. We can relate this back to the broker discussion by outlining the concrete service scenario to be realised in the Agora prototype (see Figure 6). This will provide a service in autumn 1998 and will provide a view over a social science subset of resources. Several databases will be available for searching for discovery purposes: general purpose union catalogues, specific social science resources, and a library catalogue specialising in social sciences (British Library of Political, Economic and Social Sciences). Several databases will also be available for location purposes, including a union catalogue, a BLDSC resource, and a library catalogue (University of East Anglia). Requests will be sent to the BL, to a group of libraries, and to an individual library. ● User access. Agora will explore the construction of personalised landscapes by matching a user profile (with user permissions and interests) against service/collection descriptions. Initially, with a low number of resources available, this may be somewhat artificial and resources may be listed. For discovery, the user interface will need to offer search options based on the capabilities of the resources selected to be searched. January 1999 BROKER SERVICES 49 Journal of Documentation, Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1999 © Aslib, The Association for Information Management. All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Aslib, The Association for Information Management Staple Hall, Stone House Court, London EC3A 7PB Tel: +44 (0) 171 903 0000, Fax: +44 (0) 171 903 0011 Email: [email protected], WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/aslib Decisions will have to be taken about how to present locate and request services which will depend on the business model in operation: end-users may not have access to these services. The aim will be to present services in terms of logical functions: users will not have to worry about underlying mechanics or protocols. As one moves from left to right, the difficulty in business terms of developing the service increases. ● Applications framework. Agora will initially support discovery, locate, request and deliver. The system will need to be able to manage intrafunction integration within these and inter-function operations between JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION vol. 55, no. 1 50 Journal of Documentation, Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1999 © Aslib, The Association for Information Management. All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Aslib, The Association for Information Management Staple Hall, Stone House Court, London EC3A 7PB Tel: +44 (0) 171 903 0000, Fax: +44 (0) 171 903 0011 Email: [email protected], WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/aslib User Processes (Potentially Iterative) Data Entities Discover Locate Request Deliver Collection & Service