Enterprise Abstraction

NPArC - NRC Publications Archive

As noted by Richard, and amplified by MichaelGeist and Peter Suber - The National Research Council (NRC) of Canada's Senior Executive Committee (SEC) has mandated that effective January 2009, all deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports produced by NRC will require deposit in the NRC Publication Archive (known as NPArC). 

CISTI has produced a press release providing additional details including some areas of potential exemption: 

Wherever possible, NPArC will provide access to the full text of these publications. NRC's License to Publish (Crown Copyright) will be updated to declare its intent to deposit the full-text of NRC-authored publications in NPArC. However, the nature, timing and extent of access to individual publications depends on a variety of factors, including agreements with publishers, or in the case of technical reports the sensitivity or confidentiality of content.

As the architect for the NPArC project, I'm proud to see some movement forward by NRC on the difficult legal and policy issues for this initiative.  The technology is one thing, but as has been demonstrated time and again, the true hurdles with institutional repositories are less technical, and more human in origin.

That said... just a bit of the technology/architecture:  The NPArC project is intending to piggy-back on our ongoing Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) project that CISTI has been working on for the past while.  The TDR is, among other things, CISTI's solution to moving forward with SOA-based article-level content and metadata management.  The TDR - based broadly on the OAIS reference model - is intended to handle tens of millions of bibliographic records and articles - and is planned to be CISTI's primary article-level storage and management infrastructure.  It's much more than NPArC itself needs - but it's planned that TDR will be supporting a number of other CISTI offerings and services as well.

 

NRC-CISTI Wordle

OK, last one I think... but I couldn't resist.  A CISTI Wordle created by pasting the text of the top few pages of CISTI's website into Wordle. 

CISTI LibX Edition

I've been fooling with library toolsbars, sidebars, web and widgets for awhile now... and a few months back I'd resigned myself to finally getting around to doing a LibX library toolbar for CISTI.  I'd even gotten a mostly-working version done a few months back.  At the end of last week I decided it was time to finish.  Lo and behold, I go to the LibX site and discover the wonder that is the LibX Edition Builder!  Holy moly, it's just wonderful.  Within 15 minutes I had a working toolbar for CISTI.  Of course the details and testing tool a day or so, but I finally think I've gotten a version decent enough to make live and public. 

This version is intended mainly for staff of the National Research Council - CISTI's parent organization - but I imagine it would still be useful for most CISTI patrons.

Check it out, and let me know what you think:

• CISTI LibX Toolbar @ CISTI Lab - Some info from me, and access to the IE version installer.
• CISTI LibX Edition @ LibX - The main edition site on LibX - Firefox only install.

CISTI Lab

Many months back we'd started CISTI Lab, a website for CISTI developers to expose some beta applications and to illustrate some of the more experimental work that's not yet ready for prime time, but that could use some exposure and a few more eyes.

The Lab has recently been revamped, and now includes some of the work being done by the CISTI Research group, as well as a wiki that explains some of the work.  As time goes on we hope to be adding some new additions, hopefully including some SOA-based architecture and related services, tools and applications.  For one, I'm hoping to revamp or replace the CISTI Toolbar application I wrote with something a bit better... most likely LibX based.

From the CISTI Lab site:

CISTI Lab visitors and collaborators will be able to test and evaluate Web-based experimental applications for science libraries. It is a place for CISTI to demonstrate prototypes, collaborate with researchers within NRC as well as Universities, libraries and the private sector and to obtain feedback from early adopters.

CISTI Lab has at its disposal a significant collection of electronic documents and meta-data about these documents as well as a collection of software tools and APIs for building Web applications and Web Services.

From an architecture perspective, it's a place that we hope we can use to help prove architecture and technology concepts, expose some experimental web services, and to encourage innovation in the area of libraries and technology.  More generally, CISTI is hoping to encourage collaboration and interest from like minded individuals and organizations.

Job Posting - Technology Architect - IT

Interested in libraries and architecture?  Perhaps you'd be interested in the recent job posting for an architecture position at CISTI?  Despite the job title - Technology Architect - the position is really about enterprise architecture, SOA and the like. 

eBook Loans

From CISTI's press release:

The National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) and MyiLibrary, the market leading eBook aggregator, have partnered to launch an innovative new service called eBook Loans, an electronic twist on the traditional library-interlending model. With the click of a mouse, eBook Loans offer instant access to tens of thousands of electronic books from major scholarly publishers, including Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Blackwell and Springer.

I'm proud to have been involved in the development of CISTI's eBook Loan service.  Basically, the CISTI catalogue now contains the data for the books that MyiLibrary offers within the scientific technical and medical fields.  We worked with the guys at MyiLibrary to enable a decent linkage between CISTI and MyiLibrary's collection, and to provide a simple means to register, pay for and receive your ebooks.  The procedure is to search the CISTI catalogue, and if you get a hit for a book can can be electronically loaned, you'll be directed to login/register and pay for your loan.  You're then given a link that's good for 30 days to access the loaned material.

To peruse the available eBooks, you can click here to activate a eBook loan specific search of CISTI's Catalogue.  Thousands of eBooks are available.

CISTI Pay Per Article

CISTI's Pay Per Article has just been released on the CISTI website.  Pay Per Article (get it?  Paper Article - even though, the product is really very electronic from the search to payment to the delivery of items) is a new offering from CISTI, that allows article level searching and ordering of documents from CISTI.  It is based on the idea that many clients, rather than being pre-registered and requiring lots of information, could simply order documents with a credit card. 

From an architecture perspective Pay Per Artcle is CISTI's first truly SOA-based application release.  The project has produced a lot of new web services (based on our architecture) that we hope to use, reuse and expose in the near future.

More information is available at the Pay Per Article site, or the Pay Per Article FAQ.

Google Summer of Code @ CISTI

Vellino writes about our application at CISTI to be mentors for Google Summer of Code.  Any students interested in participating please checkout the ideas page on CISTI Lab.  Note that we're particularly interested in projects regarding library and digital library applications. 

CISTI Research

Andre Vellino, newly appointed to CISTI's Research section, has started a new blog -- Synthèse -- about his experience and work at CISTI and areas of particular interest to library technology and scientific research. 

I intend to present some thoughts about information retrieval, logic and cognitive science as well as electronic libraries and information management. I hope it will cover a broad spectrum of subjects and live up to its name.

The architecture group expects to be working closely with the research group and with Andre.  It's not often that I've heard of a close link between architecture and research, but I can imagine some good and positive possibilities from such interactions, particularly with the small teams and organization here at CISTI.  I wonder if others have engaged in an architecture process in collaboration with a research group.

Our current expectation is that research would be looking farther outward - say 5-10 years in timeframe, whilst architecture usually sets it's targets closer to the 2-5 year span.  Both groups are forward looking, but in different timeframes and contexts.

Welcome Andre.

NRC summer jobs

Students who would like to apply for summer jobs at the National Research Council (of which CISTI is a member) may apply online.

The deadline to apply is January 31 2007.

The NRC Summer Employment Program provides students with practical career-related   experience in research and development, library sciences, communications and   marketing.

The Summer Employment Program offers students a challenging and intellectually   stimulating environment, while providing them with access to superior equipment,   facilities and expertise. Summer positions are offered at NRC institutes and   corporate offices. Each term lasts for a period of approximately sixteen weeks   (four months). Salaries are based on the number of academic terms a student   has completed.