The role of knowledge bases in
improving discoverability now and in
the future- why national and
international collaboration is key
CONCERT Conference:
Taipei, Nov 2011
Sarah Pearson
University of Birmingham
Co-Chair KBART Working Group
University of Birmingham
 UoB Campus
Agenda
 The changing e-resource landscape
 The need for integration and visibility
 The role of library technology
 Standards and best practice
 What does the future hold?
Changing expectations
 The explosion of online publishing output
 Access more with less – the Big Deal
 The global economic crisis
 Rising user expectation
 The technology landscape shifting
The changing e-resource landscape
 Library catalogue (OPAC)
 Link resolvers
 Federated search engines
 Vertical search resource discovery services
 Semantic web and content aggregation
What is a knowledge base?
 A database
 Contains information about web resources (global)
– e.g. what journal holdings are available in JSTOR
– and how you link to articles in them
 Contains information about the resources a library has
licensed/owns (local)
– May contain electronic and print holdings (in addition to a number of
other services)
 Used by a link resolver to direct institutional users to the
‘appropriate copy’
So why is it so important?
 It knows where all the content is
 It knows which versions the library is able to access
 So – it’s the only place that can get a user to the
“appropriate copy”
And that means......
 More content visible to end users
 Content linking is more accurate for end users
 Increase in content usage
 Maximum reach for authors and editors
 Better return on investment for library
 Favourable renewal decision
 Protection of revenue for content providers
Knowledge base: Holdings information used by an OpenURL link resolver. OpenURL
link resolver matches against knowledge base to determine availability of electronic full text
print
collections
gateways
metadata string
database
publisher
website
article title = …
first author = …
journal name = …


article citation



OpenURL query (base URL
+ metadata string)
link resolver’s
knowledge base
repository
base URL of
link resolver
publisher/provider
holdings data
resolver.institution.edu
predictable link
library
holdings data
institution
content licence
target (cited)
article
If the holdings information in the knowledge base is
outdated/incorrect, it impacts the OpenURL link resolver
performance. This affects the decision making-process of
librarians and ultimately end user experience.
In order to expect consistent metadata delivery from content
providers, the requirements need to be consistent as well.
Right. So. What is KBART?
 Knowledge Bases And Related Tools
 UKSG and NISO collaborative project
 UKSG 2007 research report,
“Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain”
 To improve navigation of the e-resource supply chain by…..
 Ensuring timely transfer of accurate data to knowledge bases
 Standards / industry organisations
– UKSG and NISO
 Working group members (stakeholders):
– Knowledge base vendors

ExLibris, Serials Solutions, EBSCO, OCLC
– Content Providers (Publisher & Aggregators)

AIP, T&F, Royal Society Publishing, Publishing Technology, Cengage Gale,
Swets, Springer
– Libraries & Consortia
 Full list -- http://www.uksg.org/kbart/members
Deliverables
 A NISO Recommended Practice
 A universally acceptable holdings list format
 Tab-delimited text files
 Delivered via HTTP or FTP
 Guidelines for fields and values
 A single format for sharing holdings data across the scholarly content supply
chain
 Hosted by providers
 Discoverable on the registry
 First publisher KBART adopter
– http://librarians.scitation.org/librarians/help_files.jsp
http://sites.google.com/site/kbartregistry/
Registry contact
Where are we at?
 Phase I KBART Recommended Practice released Jan
2010
www.uksg.org/kbart
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart
 Endorsers listed at http://www.uksg.org/kbart/hub
 Phase II started in March 2010
KBART Phase 2
 Consortial metadata fields included
 Open access metadata requirements
 Further refinement of fields for e-books and conference
proceedings
Institutional
entitlements
Consortial
Licences
Industry
Standards
Resource
Discovery
Developments
Metadata
Repository
KBART
Publisher
Engagement
Commercial
Knowledge
Bases
Shared Services
KB Metadata: The Future
 Shared services and ‘above campus’ solutions to eresource management inefficiencies
 Best practice on integration with Resource Discovery
Services
 Open metadata initiatives to improve re-user of collections
metadata
 Analysis of standards in ERM arena and gap analysis
Thank You!
Sarah Pearson
E-Resources & Serials Coordinator
University of Birmingham
s.pearson.1@bham.ac.uk