hangingtogether.org

Recently, OCLC launched an experiment in making it easier for members to update and correct WorldCat records. Dubbed the Expert Community Experiment, the goal is to engage the community in improving overall database quality. Specifically, members with full-level cataloging authorizations have the ability to improve and upgrade WorldCat master records during the experiment. It began in February and will last six months.

In March, there were 18,910 Expert Community Experiment replaces.  There were 1001 institutions that did at least one replace.  Individual institution numbers ranged from 3 institutions doing more than 500 replaces to 242 institutions doing 1 replace each. Other figures:

Database Enrichment: 18,235
Minimal-Level Upgrade: 14,791
Enhance Regular: 15,052
Enhance National: 3,583
CONSER Authentication: 1,929
CONSER Maintenance: 6,183

To put this into perspective, during the same period OCLC staff replaced 1,086,715 records. This isn’t to say that we couldn’t see substantial improvements in database quality under a less strict editing regime, only that you likely didn’t know just how hard we work to improve the WorldCat database. I sure didn’t, and I work here.

Try out the enhanced and expanded Virtual International Authority File at viaf.org.. It now contains 7.8 million records built from 9.2 million source authority records from the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, and the National Library of Sweden. More files will be added. Thom discusses the recent changes to VIAF in his Outgoing blog:

The VIAF site has recently had a major overhaul.  What you now search are records created from a merge of matching source authority records.  Within this record you can see what source records were used to create it, along with cross references and other information gleaned both from the authority records and from associated bibliographic records.

We all have our favorite “authority control poster children”, as Lorcan calls them.  The example he blogged about is Flann O’Brien.  One of my favorites is Chiang Kai-shek – that is the preferred form in the LC and National Library of Sweden authority files, but it’s listed on top with Jiang, Jieshi, the preferred form in the Bibliothèque nationale de Franc and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek authority files. It illustrates a difference in perspective: Jiang Jieshi is the Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin pronunciation of the characters in Chiang Kai-shek’s name. One of the beauties of VIAF is that it aggregates the preferred forms used in different sources without itself preferring one form over another.

Click twice to see the full sized images.

And it lists all the alternate forms each of those sources includes, a very long list that also includes several forms in Chinese characters:

When is a repository not a repository? When it’s an OPAC? Are OPACs in reality a species of repository, however reluctantly, given that the genus is usually used with a specific application in mind - one which is a newcomer to the library world whose value is still not convincingly proven?

In the UK, JISC is about to award a tender for a study on The links between library OPACs and repositories in Higher Education Institutions. The invitation to tender states:

Repositories and OPACs … share various features and requirements. Both depend for their efficiency upon accurate metadata. Both provide a primary service to the home institution but also provide services to external users, for example in enabling access to content for a user from another institution. Various items of content may be accessible both through the library OPAC and through the repository, sometimes in different versions (e.g. a preprint in a repository and a published journal article under licence in an OPAC).

Its terms of reference include:

survey the extent to which repository content is in scope for institutional library OPACs, and the extent to which it is already recorded there;

examine the interoperability of OPAC and repository software for the exchange of metadata and other information;

list the various services to institutional managers, researchers, teachers and learners offered respectively by OPACs and by repositories;

make recommendations for the development of possible further links between library OPACs and institutional repositories, identifying the benefits of such links to various stakeholder groups.

Reading this reminded me that the University of Edinburgh has recently announced the introduction of an Open Access publication mandate. The Library will continue to run its Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) open access repository alongside a new, closed, Publications Repository (PR), which will support research assessment and profiling. As the criteria for institutional deposit proliferate, the mandate document includes a FAQ section to answer researchers’ concerns. One is:

What about research outputs which are not journal articles? The PR and ERA can accept most research output types including books, book chapters, conference proceedings, performances, video, audio etc. In some cases – for example books not available electronically – the PR/ERA will hold only metadata, with the possibility of links to catalogues so that users can find locations….

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The title of this post is my homage to another famous Belgian.

I have been posting from the 9th International Bielefeld Conference in Germany. In yesterday’s closing keynote, Herbert Van de Sompel gave a most unusual presentation. Preparing, on his return to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for a six-month sabbatical, he used the occasion to review the work he and his various teams have done over the past 10 years or so - and bravely assessed the success or otherwise of the major various initiatives in which he has been involved - SFX, OpenURL, OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and MESUR (not for the acronymically faint-hearted). Incidentally, the 10-year boundary was as much accident as design. With the exception of one slide (pictured) showing his various project clusters, he had not prepared a new presentation, but instead paced around in front of a succession of old ones – some looking pretty dated – displayed in fabulous detail on the gigantic screen in the Bielefeld Convention Centre main hall. With a plea for more work on digital preservation, he stated that he had discovered that those Powerpoint presentations which were more than 10 years old were no longer readable.

The SFX development work, done at the University of Ghent, has resulted in some 1,700 SFX servers installed worldwide, which link – at a conservative estimate – to some 3 million items every day. Less successful, in his view, was the OpenURL NISO standard. It took three years to achieve, and – despite his ambitious intentions at the time – is still used almost exclusively for journal article linking. Reflecting on this, he remarked that the library community finds it hard to get its standards adopted outwith the library realm.

Herbert was also ambivalent about OAI-PMH. The systemic change predicted at the time of its development has not happened, and may never happen. He remarked that ‘Discovery today is defined by Google’, and in that context PMH did not do a good job because it is based on metadata. Ranking is based on who points at you (see my earlier post on the Webometrics ranking). ‘No one points at metadata records’. But it still provides a good means of synchronising XML-formatted metadata between databases.

He feels that we are moving on from a central concern with journal articles in any case. ‘What do we care about the literature any more? It’s all about the data (and let’s make sure that the data does not go the way of the literature!)’. He offered some reflections on institutional repositories in passing. They are not ends in themselves (though often seem to be). There is a difference between their typical application in the US and in Europe. European libraries use them more for storing traditional academic papers – versions of the articles which appear in peer-reviewed journals. In the US, there is a tendency to use them for ‘all that other stuff’. They are relatively unpopulated due to the fact that authors find it hard to care once they have had the paper accepted by their intended journal. But the other problem is workflow. Most repositories require deposit procedures which are outwith faculty workflows. Worse - content is being deposited by faculty all over the web – on YouTube’s SciTV, on blogs, in flickr. They have no time left for less attractive hubs. We need a button with the simplicity and embeddedness of the SFX resolver button to be present in these environments before we will truly optimise harvesting of content into the repository. There is a challenge …

The ORE work learned lessons from PMH. PMH did not address web architecture primitives. That was why Google rejected the protocol. It did not fit with their URI-crawling world view. ORE therefore used the architecture of the web as the platform for interoperability.

As for the MESUR project, directed by his compatriot Johan Bollen, Herbert described it as ‘phenomenal’. MESUR took the view that citations as a measure of impact were appropriate for the paper-based world. But now we should assess network-based metrics (the best known of which is Google’s PageRank). A billion usage events were collected to test the hypothesis that network metric data contains valuable data on impact. The hypothesis, he believes, was proved correct. There is structure there, and the ability to derive usable metrics. Indeed, the correlations produced by MESUR reached the fairly radical conclusion that the citation analysis data we have been using for decades is an outlier when compared with network-based methods.

Overall then, more plus points than negatives. And not only was his audience not inclined to criticise, but he was urged to stay and complete his presentation even though it ran over his allotted time by about 20 minutes at the end of an intensive day. How many people in our profession could discuss their work with reference to so many iconic projects? He concluded with a simple message - which he had come to see clearly as he prepared this review: we do what we do in order to optimise the time of researchers. Some recent studies, such as the UK Research Information Network’s Activities, costs and funding flows in scholarly communications (discussed earlier in the conference by Michael Jubb, Director of RIN), and the more recent JISC report, Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits, express researcher time in cash terms. It amounts to billions of pounds each year.

How much money has been saved and so made available for further research by the projects developed and overseen by Herbert and his colleagues? There is optimisation to be proud of.

Librarian can be a fragile and even uncomfortable designation in today’s world. Nonetheless, as our roles continue to expand, change and develop, it seems that librarian as an anchoring designation can become more necessary. We could easily imagine it sitting at the centre of a mind-map, with dozens of roles spidering out of it. On Tuesday, the first day of the 9th International Bielefeld Conference here in Germany, Wendy Pradt Lougee listed some new capacities which she would like to see in entrants to the profession. One of them was Leverager - a word that does not work well at least in UK English because leverage used as a verb is much rarer than in US English. One which I might add, on the basis of at least two of yesterday’s presentations, is Optimiser.

Isidro Aguillo, Director of Madrid’s Cybermetrics Lab (CCHS-CSIC), spoke about the optimisation of university websites. CCHS-CSIC publishes the international Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

Isidro discussed the new indicators of institutional web presence strength which his group is developing, classified into three types. Impact (link visibility and analysis) and Usage (visits, downloads) are well known. More challenging is Activity (number of web pages and documents; number of academic papers in Scholar and other databases; frequency of invocation of researchers’ names; distribution of content and its translation into other languages; blogmetrics). Activity indicators are becoming more important, and librarians may have particular expertise to offer their universities as they seek to optimise their web presences through them.

The Cybermetrics Lab provides a Decalogue of good practices in institutional web positioning. I provide here an edited version.

The following recommendations are intended to give some advice to Universities and R&D institutions worldwide in order that they have an adequate web presence. Their websites should represent correctly their resources, activities and global performance, providing visitors with a true vision of the institution. We encourage medium and long term projects that give priority to the publication of large volumes of quality content under Open Access type models.
1. URL naming
Each institution should choose a unique institutional domain that can be used by all the websites of the institution. It is very important to avoid changing the institutional domain as it can generate confusion and has a devastating effect on the visibility values. The use of alternative or mirror domains should be disregarded even when they provide redirection to the preferred one. Use of well known acronyms is correct but the institution should consider including descriptive words, like the name of the city, in the domain name.
2. Contents: Create
A large web presence is made possible only with the effort of a large group of authors. The best way to do that is by allowing a large proportion of staff, researchers or graduate students to be potential authors.
3. Contents: Convert
Important resources are available in non-electronic format that can easily be converted to web pages. Most universities have a long record of activities that can be published in historical websites.
4. Interlinking
The Web is a hypertextual corpus with links connecting pages. If your contents are not known (bad design, limited information, or minority language), the size is small or they have low quality, the site probably will receive few links from other sites. Measuring and classifying the links from others can be revealing.
5. Language, especially English
The Web audience is truly global, so you should not think locally. Language versions, especially in English, are mandatory not only for the main pages, but for selected sections and particularly for scientific documents.
6. Rich and media files
Although html is the standard format of web pages, sometimes it is better to use rich file formats like Adobe Acrobat pdf or MS Word doc as they allow a better distribution of documents.
7. Search engine-friendly designs
Avoid cumbersome navigation menus based on Flash, Java or JavaScript that can block robot access. Deep nested directories or complex interlinking can also block robots. Databases and even highly dynamic pages can be invisible for some search engines, so use directories or static pages instead.
8. Popularity and statistics
Number of visits is important, but it is as important to monitor their origin, distribution and the reasons why they reach your websites.
9. Archiving and persistence
Maintaining a copy of old or outdated material in the site should be mandatory. Sometimes relevant information is lost when the site is redesigned or simply updated and there is no way to recover the vanished pages easily.
10. Standards for enriching sites
The use of meaningful titles and descriptive metatags can increase the visibility of pages.

An RLG Partner working group that I facilitated has completed its analysis of the 134 responses from 67 RLG partners to a survey conducted in October-November 2008.  What We’ve Learned from the RLG Partners Metadata Creation Workflows Survey (173K/23 pp.) has just been released. Among the findings:

•    The working group had hoped that the survey would point to tools and resources for streamlining metadata workflows that might be shared within the RLG Partnership and that could be adapted locally. However, survey responses suggest that the tools being used are very localized, and no one tool kit is being used
•    Among those who create both MARC and non-MARC metadata, two-thirds used the same staff. Furthermore, 80% reported that creating non-MARC metadata was part of their “routine workflows.”
•    Although non-MARC metadata creation is considered “routine”, less than half have training programs for teaching staff how to create metadata.
•    A major hurdle that may need to be overcome is the assumption that people searching for resources will start with the local website, repository, catalog – instead of on the Web (where most people start, according to the research into discovery practices).
•    The working group was reassured that libraries are exposing their data in multiple ways. A relatively high percentage exposes metadata through union catalogs, crawlers like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and OAI-PMH harvesters.
•    The differences in staffing patterns for MARC and non-MARC metadata creation may indicate that creating non-MARC metadata in fact is not routine.
•    Slightly more than half of respondents reported that they do not have routine procedures for maintaining and updating non-MARC metadata. Is non-MARC metadata maintenance hindered by the lack of widely available tools or the distributed environment in which non-MARC metadata is created?

Respondents’ comments indicate that that this is still a fluid time in our profession and that organizations are in flux, too. Several noted that they were just developing tools or were in the process of restructuring their workflows. The working group identified several questions for possible future research.

We are grateful to all the RLG Partner staff who took the time to respond to the survey. On a personal note, I found it a true delight to work with: Leighann Ayers (U. Michigan), Beth Picknally Camden (U. Pennsylvania), Lisa German (Penn State), Peggy Johnson (U. Minnesota), and Caroline Miller (UCLA).  I hope you enjoy looking through the results for yourselves! Comments welcome!

I kicked off a new RLG Partner Working Group this week, on social metadata. (So new, it’s not written up on our Web site yet.)  As I’m wont to do with new groups, I asked each of the members to share a short self-introduction about what it was about “social metadata” that is most exciting, what perspective each is bringing to our discussions, what projects each may have worked on (or is working on) that would be relevant to an effort to communicate and share the array of potential user contributions on the network level.

Helice Koffler, Manuscripts and Special Collections Materials Cataloging Librarian at the University of Washington Libraries, responded by sharing a blog post - but then realized she didn’t have the right blog to present it. So I’m sharing it here, with Helice’s permission. - Karen

Ceci n’est pas une vache

Looking back, I’d have to say that one of my formative experiences with social metadata in an archival setting predates the current explosion of Web 2.0 tools.  Several years ago, when I was working in a local government archives, I was involved in developing a traveling exhibit to promote the use of a rich, yet underutilized photograph collection, which documented the history of the Public Health Department.  A colleague and I worked closely together on selecting the topics to be covered in the display and in researching the photographs we had chosen for inclusion in the exhibit.  Over the course of our research, we found several of these images (or related images, clearly from the same event or photography session) reproduced in publications also held by the archives and we were able to make more precise identifications of some previously unidentified photographs.

One of the images we selected for the exhibit (shown here) was used to illustrate a section on the the Public Health Department’s evolving role in the inspection of milk processing and distribution facilities.

Research did not turn up any conclusive information about this picture, although, for various reasons, we concluded that it probably had been taken during the 1960s at the Carnation Research Farm (You cannot make it out in this digital thumbnail, but if the image was to be enlarged you might be able to see more clearly that there was lettering on the man’s hat which read “Carnation”).  Nevertheless, 99.9% wasn’t quite good enough for us.  The concluding sentence of the original caption in the display for this photograph read:

This photograph may have been taken at the Carnation Research Farm.

Now, in the course of putting the exhibit together, the entire archives staff, at one point or another, had looked at, and had a vote in, choosing the images we ultimately put in the exhibit and had proofread all of the decriptive captions.  When the exhibit finally was presented at its first venue it was deemed a success.  Subsequently, it was taken on the road and repurposed in various ways (including a few different Web manifestations).  However, after this initial presentation, when we were in the process of adapting the exhibit for a new (and potentially more important) location, my boss mentioned to me that her husband, who had worked briefly at Carnation many years earlier, had been looking at the photographs and declared that this photograph had to have been taken at that plant.  My boss told me that I should go ahead and change the caption to read: “The photograph was taken at the Carnation Research Farm.”

Hmm, I thought, “Was her husband involved in the direct ‘chain of custody’ of this image?  Did he take the picture?  Did he personally know the lead cow?”  In the end, I demurred and did not make the change.

But upon reflection, I now wonder if I was just being stubborn or if indeed I was standing up for some sort of a principle.  In the current 2.0 environment, I’d be absolutely delighted if, as an archivist, I had put that picture “out there” and some codger went ahead and put it up on his “All Things Carnation” blog or added any tags to a Flickr site, but I still do not feel that there had been sufficient evidence established for the archives to definitively identify the precise date or location of the image.

These issues of authority and authenticity continue to fascinate me.  I look forward to working with the RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group and having other perspectives shared.

Nancy Elkington and I were involved - with Stephen Pinfield at Nottingham, and others - in drafting the bid to JISC for the SHERPA Project in the UK, back in 2002. The acronym was my invention, which I mention only because it is rarely given in its uncontracted form: Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access. It is fairly indigestible, I will admit, but the ‘hybrid environment’ we envisaged was one in which libraries and publishers collaborated over research publication, by means of mechanisms we could not yet foresee, within a terrain which featured freely available institutional repositories as well as commercially produced published journals. SHERPA’s aim was to kick-start these repositories.

PEER is a new, pioneering collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community, funded by the European Commission, which has just published invitations to tender for two of three important studies to be undertaken over the next few years. PEER will make an important contribution to the debate over whether the sort of hybrid environment envisaged by SHERPA is achievable, by gathering the evidence in the form of an Observatory which will sit at the heart of these studies. In the news release email, Chris Armbruster of the Max Planck Digital Library, who will lead the Observatory, emphasises that the starting point is one of openness among the players:

Significant about the PEER project is the cooperation of the various stakeholders in the scholarly publishing cycle without prejudice.

Participating publishers have agreed to make available at least 16,000 peer reviewed manuscripts destined to become journal articles in ISI-ranked journals for archiving every year for three years. The work will focus on what the project documentation calls ’stage-two’ research outputs - i.e. the author’s final peer-reviewed manuscript, not the unrefereed preprint (’stage one’) nor the final published version (’stage three’). The December news release, posted to various lists, states that

The aim is to investigate the effects of the large-scale deposit (so called Green Open Access) on user access, author visibility, and journal viability.

At the heart of the project an Observatory will be built to gather evidence about the impact of systematic archiving of stage-two research outputs. Three strands of research will be tendered:

Behavioural Research: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories (Call mid-December 2008, Deadline mid-February 2009). The objectives will be to:

Track trends and explain patterns of author and user behaviour in the context of so called Green Open Access

Understand the role repositories play for authors in the context of journal publishing

Understand the role repositories play for users in context of accessing journal articles.

Usage Research: Journals and Repositories (Call mid-December 2008, Deadline mid-February 2009). The objectives will be to:

Determine usage trends at publishers and repositories

Understand source and nature of use of deposited manuscripts in repositories

Track trends, develop indicators and explain patterns of usage for repositories and journals.

Economic research: The deposit of journal manuscripts in repositories (Summer 2009). The objectives will be to:

Compare the efficiency and cost effectiveness of methods of deposit, e.g. publisher-assisted vs. author self-archiving

Compare the efficiency and cost effectiveness of access, e.g. repositories vs. publisher systems.

PEER is based on the selection of 200-300 ISI-ranked journals, from which manuscripts will be selected for deposit. Publishers will hold a control group of equivalent journals from which no manuscripts will be deposited. Half of the manuscripts will be deposited directly by the publisher, but the other half will require action by the author before archiving. Authors will be invited to deposit in repositories participating in the PEER project.

Partners in PEER are The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), the European Science Foundation, Göttingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society and l’Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), supported by the SURF Foundation and the University of Bielefeld, which will contribute the expertise of the EU-funded DRIVER project. The funding comes from the European Commission’s eContentplus Programme.

The PEER project has nominated a Research Oversight Group consisting of

“Names touch everything” came up early in the series of conference calls held with the Networking Names Advisory Group, prior to our meeting on November 17, 2008 hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. And indeed they do.

We learned, for example, from Suzanne Pilsk (Smithsonian) that there are “plant authors” – people who discover or name plants, but do not necessarily write the articles about them. The group came up with a large number of potential users and uses for the Cooperative “Identities Hub” – both as a type of “switch” that could link from and to various sources of names, and as a means to take advantage of social networking, where people could add, edit, and provide additional information about the names they found. Many categories of target audience could potentially do multiple functions:

We have a recent example of linking to names across domains. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney added links from persons represented in their museum collection catalog to WorldCat Identities for information about their published works. My colleague Thom Hickey was able to point to an example in his recent talk at the National Library of Australia’s 2008 forum. Scroll down to the “Person” section in the right column you’ll see several with a [view on WorldCat] annotation. The link to the Bob Carr WorldCat Identities page gives additional context to the museum’s information.

The group came up with five sets of use case scenarios: archivists, publishers, institutional repositories, aggregators and other types of repositories, and universities. We’ll be following up on our discussions and producing a report summarizing the recommendations.

The UK’s Research Information Network (RIN) has just published a document aimed at UK university Vice Chancellors, Presidents and Principals, Ensuring a bright future for research libraries. Jim Michalko, Lorcan Dempsey and I met with representatives of RIN, along with other European library and research organisations, after our recent European Partner meeting in Paris, and it seems clear – as Lorcan remarks in his blog - that our work agenda for the RLG Partnership coincides in various ways with the work being undertaken by RIN. Here are a few examples.

In Linking library content and collections to research strategies they state:

No single institution can provide all the publications and other information resources – digital and non-digital – that their researchers need to consult in the course of their research… HEIs therefore should … seek to exploit the potential for collaboration with other libraries, including the national libraries and the five designated major research libraries in England.

In our Shared Print Collections programme, we say that

A new business model is needed that will enable research libraries to establish partnerships capable of sustaining the long-term future of print collections, distributing the costs and benefits of acquiring and preserving content in tangible formats, and allowing aggregate holdings to be “right sized” in view of aggregate demand.

They also recommend that universities

should … develop and implement policies and procedures to determine which information resources should be managed and preserved over the long term and how; which can be disposed of within a shorter time, and how such disposals should be managed … establish polices for managing their holdings of low-use printed material where the content is available in digital form; and participate in the UK Research Reserve and other collaborative initiatives to ensure that they adopt a planned and coherent approach to disposal

Our project to Deaccession Materials held in Print and Electronic Form, which we are running with the help of Ithaka and JSTOR, takes as its starting point

There is clearly a need for aggregated information about costs associated with storing, preserving and delivering material from print back runs of e-journals, as well as data on the costs of discarding titles before and after they have been placed in storage. A comprehensive roster of print archives and access agreements would also be a worthy contribution to efforts in this area, particularly a title-by-title registry of which instituions are committed to retaining which materials, and providing access to them.

Under the same heading, they request that universities Explicitly relate the development and acquisition of special collections of rare material to the research strengths of the institution. Our new theme Mobilizing Unique Materials includes a project to Define the State of Holdings and Description for Archives. This will use datamining methods to provide data which should help with that explicit identification of rare materials and research priorities within institutions.

Providing institutions with a system-wide view of archival collection descriptions would provide a new input into these prioritization decisions and could help inform funding agency support.

Under the theme of Cataloguing, navigation, discovery, delivery and access they ask universities to

encourage their libraries to share catalogue records with other libraries; to make them available through collaborative catalogues and online discovery services, both national and international; and to ensure that they are exposed and made available to users through Google and other search engines

In our Share Best Practices for Metadata Creation Workflows Project (within the Knowledge Structure theme) we say

Information professions are eager to know what workflows work best in different environments that could be applied to their own and that would facilitate metadata flow in and among libraries, archives and museums.

Our Infrastructure theme, meanwhile, has a range of work going on within the Web Enablement programme.

RIN advises universities to encourage their libraries to work with others in developing innovative services that integrate into researchers’ workflows. In our new programme, Support for the Research Process, we are just starting on an Academic Research Landscape Project

As a foundational stage of the program, we are carrying out an analysis of research workflows and research information management practices, to ‘anatomize’ the area into its various components.

RIN has a strong focus on scholarly communication, patchily tied in to research evaluation in the UK via the national Research Assessment Exercise and its developing successor.

HEIs … should …develop clear policies and procedures as to the roles that institutional and/or subject-based repositories should play in promoting access to institutional research outputs, as well as in facilitating the creation of registers of these outputs for research evaluation

They go on to address the library’s potential role in the contentious area of bibliometric approaches to research assessment. Institutions should

draw on the expertise and advice of library and information professionals in making use of bibliometric and cybermetric tools, which are likely to play an increasing role in the assessment and evaluation of research outputs and impact at international, national and institutional levels.

Our new Workflows in Research Assessment programme is in the process of commissioning a Survey of Current Practice which will

survey the research information management landscape across its various dimensions - cultural (what are the research assessment drivers?), geographic (which countries have well-developed infrastructures and systems?), technological (what systems are being employed or developed?) and institutional (how are libraries embedded into research information systems?).

The scope document for that survey makes explicit reference to analysing bibliometric approaches in use in a range of countries.

Finally, we have recently categorised our outputs into four main areas: Change and community (challenging editorials, Partner events, workshops, etc); Best practice architecture & standards; Beta development & tools; and Evidence - business intelligence and user observation. Business intelligence in one form is represented by reports and other outputs based on datamining. RIN urges UK universities to

seek to benchmark their library and information services for the support of research against comparable institutions both in the UK and overseas; and participate in collaborative work that seeks to identify and where possible to quantify the benefits and returns from investments that they make in their library and information services

This emphasis on return on investment is also a key theme for RLUK, as stated in its Strategic Plan 2008-2011 (as Demonstrating Value). Our programmes and projects provide many opportunities for assembling data which support the demonstration of value both institutionally and at various levels of collaboration.

The RIN report boldly asks Vice Chancellors, Presidents and Principals to invest more in their libraries - and points to libraries as sources of leadership on campus in new areas where establishing that authority will take strong and concerted effort:

The services that librarians and information professionals provide have … changed fundamentally over the past decade. They can now do much more to provide leadership that brings improvements in research performance and effectiveness … Librarians and information services need the resources and the continuing top-level support within their institutions to ensure that they can fulfil their potential and meet these challenges.

Let’s hope they listen! We are keen that the work which we are undertaking within OCLC Research in so many similar areas can add breadth to RIN’s work, and can gain some depth of understanding of the UK context from it. In conclusion, they come down to earth with a well-understood library case for the cooperative approach:

recognise that there is scope for cost savings through the sharing of information resources and expertise, and through the development of collaborative services

We couldn’t have put it any better.