OCUL Scholars Portal in 2010 and Looking Ahead:
Discussion Paper to Support Strategic Planning
February 2010
OCUL is a model of collaboration, not only for academic libraries but also for universities. We
receive inquiries from all over the world with questions on how we have tackled key service
delivery problems that other libraries have only now just begun to confront. And the
collaborative model of OCUL and Scholars Portal has made it a “poster child” within the Ontario
government for postsecondary cooperation.
Scholars Portal is a key piece of the success of OCUL and of the success of the individual
members of the consortium in serving their clients. While these clients may take this for
granted, OCUL members realize that Scholars Portal is unique in its provision of access to a
broad range of electronic resources and services through this shared system. This has been
accomplished through eight years of investment in Scholars Portal by the universities and the
Ontario government. To meet our goals, we have relied on many people in our university
libraries for the leadership, commitment, expertise, and hard work necessary to ensure
continued growth and change in Scholars Portal. As the pace of change in university libraries
has hastened, OCUL has been able to adopt emerging technologies and to seize opportunities
for growth. Each year has brought new challenges, whether technological, financial or political;
working together, we have resolved many of these.
In 2010, we need to confront four challenges.
1. The expectations of our user community (students and researchers) and of the
provincial government (which funds new projects and has an increasing say in our
planning and procurement processes) are changing.
2. Commercial service offerings, including those from the traditionally conservative
library technology sector, have been revolutionized by changes in how information is
made available on the Internet.
3. The current economic climate has created significant financial pressure in each of our
universities, and thus evaluations of previous plans for growth and ‘business as usual’
are underway.
4. Expected substantial increases in enrolment mean that universities need to find ways
to improve quality while supporting this inevitable growth in community numbers.
It is time to scrutinize and evaluate our original Scholars Portal goals, as well as the
assumptions that have underpinned these. Are they still relevant eight years later? Are there
other goals and assumptions that have emerged? And are the solutions we’ve developed over
the last eight years still “best of breed” approaches in 2010?
Recognizing the real investments and integral presence of Scholars Portal in the Ontario
academy, perhaps there are two overarching questions to consider:
o
o
If we were starting now, would we build Scholars Portal?
What should Scholars Portal be in order to support the missions of our universities for
the next decade?
Strategic foresight and the benefits of hindsight should guide our thinking.
OCUL Scholars Portal in 2010 & Looking Ahead: Discussion Paper to Support Strategic Planning, 02/2010
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In this discussion paper, we will articulate our original goals and assumptions through eight
themes, show how Scholars Portal today reflects these, and ask some questions about the
future. These need to be answered to ensure that Scholars Portal remains relevant in and
responsive to the new information environment. We hope that this review will assist OCUL in its
thinking about Scholars Portal into the next decade.
Themes
1: The costs of managing electronic resources (from acquisition, to local loading, to
curation, to delivery and integration) are so high that a cooperative approach to
delivering and managing electronic resources is the most cost effective solution for
OCUL. Scholars Portal represents that solution.
Past:
The validity of this conviction seemed so strong in the early part of the decade that it has
remained largely unquestioned over the last years. We have developed many of our content
services on this shared model. We have aggregated journal and article content under a single,
shared platform; we have aggregated e-books and survey data using the same model; and we
put forward recently, with success, a proposal based on the same model in the last round of
OntarioBuys applications for geospatial data.
Present:
As we acquire more content, we have been fortunate to see hardware costs for data storage
decrease over the decade. We have moved through two generations of mass storage
technology in the last eight years and even cheaper storage options are on the horizon. So the
model seems to be sustainable from a technology perspective into the near future. Cloud
computing infrastructures, with network based storage, are now emerging as an alternative
model to local infrastructure. Cloud computing may challenge the economics of maintaining our
own hardware based storage, but the economics of cloud computing in Canada mean that this
challenge won’t come for a few more years. And even when the economics of cloud computing
make sense for us, the issues of sovereignty of data will remain an ongoing issue with cloud
computing. Many individual schools have increased their own local storage infrastructures to
step up to the needs of institutional repository storage, open access publishing, and local
digitization efforts. But the aggregation of content in Scholars Portal remains unique in its scale,
difficult to replicate, and has positioned OCUL well to participate in emerging plans for a
distributed, national content archiving network.
Future:
One central shared hardware storage environment underpins Scholars Portal. OCUL could look
to reduce costs through new local technologies and emerging network based storage
technologies. What factors do we need to consider to ensure that the most cost effective
solutions are utilized?
Supporting both access and digital curation together has been the fundamental formula for
Scholars Portal in meeting our Ontario clients’ needs. Is this still valid?
Given external broadcast/federated search and web scale indexes such as Google and, much
more recently, Summon, is aggregation of content (journals, books, and numeric and geospatial
OCUL Scholars Portal in 2010 & Looking Ahead: Discussion Paper to Support Strategic Planning, 02/2010
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data) in Scholars Portal still a relevant model to support access?
alternatives?
Are there feasible
Have new options emerged with repositories or OJS that have lowered the costs of providing
enduring and reliable access to information?
Should OCUL strengthen its access and digital curation formula by forming national and
international partnerships that would place Scholars Portal into a broader network of digital
repositories?
Should OCUL participate in national cyberinfrastructure planning? How soon would this require
a commitment to take Scholars Portal into significant new directions?
2: Students are hindered in their use of library resources by the large number of
interfaces they have to deal with; aggregating content under a single interface is a
good way to address this confusion and maximize the user experience with library
resources.
Past:
This conviction has done much to direct the work of Scholars Portal from 2002 until today.
Commercial content providers in the early days of the decade refused to sacrifice strong
commercial identity in their interfaces in the interest of providing our users with common search
features such as a common search syntax, or standard ways for saving and citing data. OCUL
and Scholars Portal stepped in to this gap in a heroic way – aggregating content from journal
publishers and database vendors (some of whom were at first reluctant to partner with us and
needed convincing and coaxing). OCUL also tackled this at a time when the predominant
thinking among libraries in North America was that a new era of “access versus ownership” had
emerged, that old models of data ownership were passé, and that broadcast federated
searching would be the way to address issues related to disparate user interfaces.
Present:
The wheel of this discussion has turned full circle in the last decade, in this case confirming the
wisdom of OCUL’s early approach to aggregation with the emergence of new “Web-scale”
discovery systems from a number of commercial vendors. Through Scholars Portal, OCUL has
brought together over 500 million individual resources from dozens of different providers,
including over 20 different journal publishers, a dozen book publishers, and more than a dozen
database vendors. Scholars Portal Search has been used by OCUL researchers to run 60
million searches since 2005, exposing researchers to content and databases that they may
have neglected due to the need to master unfamiliar user interfaces and idiosyncratic search
syntaxes, as well as the sheer time involved in repeating searches in multiple systems.
Scholars Portal, among both non-commercial and commercial enterprises, offers OCUL user
today one of the very largest single aggregations of all types of high quality research content.
Future:
Search, however, changes faster than any other aspect of Scholars Portal. Library vendors,
driven by lessons learned from Web-based searching, have begun to implement the same kind
of aggregation strategy that Scholars Portal has been practicing since 2002 – gathering
metadata, full-text, abstracts and indexes to create searchable mega-indexes and then linking
users to full-text content whether it resides in Scholars Portal or externally.
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In the face of these new offerings, does our current approach remain cost effective? Is Google
Scholar now “scholarly enough”, escaping the criticisms that greeted this service earlier in the
decade? Is Scholars Portal Search still meeting the needs of our users?
Should OCUL continue to aggregate content or look for an external solution? Is an in-house
approach to aggregation the most cost effective solution for the foreseeable future? Based on
financial quotes from providers such as Summon, it would appear that this may be the case. .
Does Scholars Portal have the capacity to remain ‘leading edge’ and ahead of commercial
solutions now that the commercial sector is focusing on web scale, aggregated services?
What is the added value in either an external solution or our local aggregation strategy?
Does the Scholars Portal platform address unique needs of OCUL schools in a way that
commercial solutions cannot?
The OCUL directors recently approved the ongoing aggregation of scholarly research
databases along with publisher metadata to create a new Search application for Scholars Portal
to replace Illumina. Assuming that this development path continues, it will be important for
Scholars Portal to closely monitor emerging solutions (both from the commercial library sector
and from the broader Internet) as it develops this new “Scholars Portal Search” to ensure that it
remains “best of breed”.
Based on the assumption that OCUL would continue to aggregate content in Scholars Portal,
there has been some interest in extending Scholars Portal Search to include local OPAC data.
This would have implications for ongoing work, both for Scholars Portal and locally, to load
MARC records for e-books.
How significant is the commercial aggregator ‘edge’ over OCUL when it comes to negotiating for
full-text content loading? Could OCUL’s position be improved, is this necessary, and at what
cost? To address these questions, some analysis of existing content holdings, the deals that
were made, and the tactics employed is underway. However, OCUL could devote more effort to
consider its past strategies, successes and disappointments and plan a new approach. Is this
warranted?
Does OCUL need to be more aggressive in seeking out content previously denied to us? For
instance, instead of approaching content providers using bottom up strategies (e.g. using our
sales contacts as our starting point for discussions about local load), should we consider other
approaches such as employing an aggressive external communications strategy while making
overtures to decision makers in these content companies from the OCUL director’s level and
seeking mutual advantage in our local loading and aggregation efforts? And, do we need to
adopt new technical strategies, such as harvesting, for acquiring content?
3: Perpetual access rights are best exercised at the point content is acquired; there
are risks in subscribing to resources without clearly defined options for accessing
that material in the long term. Scholars Portal, with its facility for local hosting, is
the best way to minimize that risk.
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Archiving cannot be separated from access -- unless access is a component of any
archiving solution, there is a high risk that support for archiving functions will
disappear over time because archiving does not support immediate needs but only
future scenarios
Past:
When Scholars Portal was created by OCUL, the directors wanted a simple, straightforward
model for journal archiving. Other organizations were pioneering the concept of dark archives;
and others were experimenting with solutions that used web caching technologies. But at the
time Scholars Portal was founded, none of these options were fully defined or widely operational
and an archiving model based on traditional library curatorial functions made the most sense.
To be engaged in journal archiving at the start of the decade was to be a pioneer. OCUL
pioneered an “open or light archive” model that combined long term preservation functions with
current user access needs. In this way, we enlisted the thousands of members of the OCUL
community in identifying content gaps as they used the system for their day to day search
needs – a simple, uncomplicated approach, but revolutionary at the time. Starting from some
very simple principles, OCUL has managed to build the largest single light journal archive
currently in existence and benefiting from eight years of constant scrutiny by its members.
Present:
Other archiving models have continued to develop and mature, including Portico (using a dark
archiving approach with defined trigger events) and LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, which employ a
web caching strategy. There is no single “right” solution to archiving, and a diversity of solutions
will serve the library community better over the very long term than any single solution could.
The directors have committed to taking the OCUL light archive model a step further by securing,
through a process of intensive auditing, designation as a Trusted Digital Repository, which
would be the first of its kind in Canada. Our conviction has been that Scholars Portal is best
positioned to meet the needs of schools to preserve journal and book content as well as to help
to rationalize print collections by becoming a TDR.
Future:
Are there compelling reasons to change the priority which OCUL has already placed on Trusted
Digital Repository (TDR) status for Scholars Portal?
Is a cost/benefit analysis of other preservation solutions, such as Portico and CLOCKSS,
appropriate at this time? Commercial systems for digital preservation both within the library
world, such as Ex Libris’ Rosetta, and in commercial industry, such as the Hitachi Active Archive
could be included in such an analysis.
Should Scholars Portal continue to employ a “light archive” model? Providing ongoing access,
while continuing to archive, meets two needs. If Scholars Portal provided only a dark archive,
would this be viable over time? What would be the risks for sustainable funding support from
stakeholders? Does OCUL wish to make this unique contribution to archiving practice and
should it remain a key strategy into the future?
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4: The best way to encourage use of library resources is to make sure they are
available where users live on the network -- e.g. course management systems, the
broader internet. Library resources are more easily integrated into places where
students work when the resources are held locally, and having local copies of those
resources (i.e. Scholars Portal) is the best approach to integration of that content
into course management systems.
Past:
This was a key original goal for Scholars Portal and yet is probably the one for which we have
had the least success in execution. In 2001, the context for integration was the emergence of
new commercial, online courseware systems. It was thought within Scholars Portal that
aggregation of content was the only way to deal with exposing that content within dozens of
potential courseware providers. The alternate prospect, of setting up separate interactions
between a dozen courseware systems and dozens of individual publishers, was too daunting to
be considered practical. Over time, though, in practice few schools made links to Scholars
Portal through their campus courseware systems, and Scholars Portal developers never had the
kind of access to those courseware tools that they would have needed to facilitate that
integration. Scholars Portal turned its attention instead to develop linking options for schools to
feature Scholars Portal services on library web sites. For various reasons, both at Scholars
Portal and at the local schools, this kind of integration has been at best a limited success.
Scholars Portal services have almost as little exposure on library web sites across OCUL as
they do on courseware systems at the OCUL universities.
Present:
Linking content into the course curriculum is a whole new ballgame today, however. The
emergence of social networking, Web 2.0, and mashups has redefined the way we think about
interaction with students and researchers and how we should support content integration. The
first big change is that integration is as likely to happen between Scholars Portal and the
individual researcher or student now as it was in the past between Scholars Portal and OCUL
library web site designers or courseware developers. Researchers expect to be able to link to
content, extract snippets that they need, pull in metadata automatically where necessary, and
share all this with colleagues in a multitude of online forums. Scholars Portal is addressing this
new expectation by opening all its content services to the public web so that all metadata is
open to the world and can be integrated in other public web sites. To enhance exposure of our
content so researchers can find it more easily on the web, we are exposing all of our content
repositories to Google for indexing. And to help OCUL libraries bring that content into their local
delivery systems, we are developing a set of programming APIs that will allow discovery layers,
library web sites and OPACs to pull in search results and provide document previews.
Compliance with the Information and Communications Standard of the AODA needs to be a
focus for Scholars Portal over the next few years. Immediately in 2010, an accessibility
evaluation of Scholars Portal will be completed; this will enable OCUL to determine the effort
and cost to ensure that all Scholars Portal services meet the mandated requirements.
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Future:
If OCUL members agree that building the best user experience is one of our shared goals, then
what should the Scholars Portal priorities be? Scholars Portal is currently an island of
information. Should it become a better Web citizen, one that shares its information with other
applications on the Internet? Are there compelling reasons for OCUL to re-think its current
direction of opening Scholars Portal content services to the public web to enhance integration
and search engine indexing?
Course management systems have become mission critical to the local universities’ teaching
and learning strategies and there is a great diversity of them at OCUL schools. To support local
needs, should OCUL increase its efforts to develop broader Web-based APIs – for searching,
authentication, sharing, group management, etc. – so that Scholars Portal can be integrated
with current and emerging courseware systems and discipline-based collaborative spaces at
each university?
In a recent OCUL proposal to COU, acknowledging the challenges of an increase in 50,000
students in the GTA over the next three years, OCUL identified this kind of capability as a key
new direction for Scholars Portal to be able to serve these new students. The challenge will be
in identifying what is best accomplished locally and what should be done within Scholars Portal.
Secondly, because the internet is more and more portable – something students carry with
them on their cell phones or other portable devices – the COU proposal emphasized the
importance of developing mobile based interfaces to Scholars Portal content.
For accessibility, OCUL should consider its strategic direction and the extent to which it will
address the challenges inherent in the AODA Information and Communications Standard.
Scholars Portal usage numbers have continued to increase; but many users continue to visit
publisher sites. What does this say about patterns of usage and preferences? Can we rely on
existing user studies and usability testing to guide our decisions? What current local information
and studies could help us to answer these questions?
5: Protecting information about our user research activities is best served when
those services are managed in Canada and preferably under our control.
Past:
The Patriot Act in the United States was a clarion call for libraries in Canada. How could we
guarantee that data collected by researchers in Canada using services housed outside Canada
would remain secure and free from scrutiny from foreign government authorities? Which kinds
of services did we need to ensure would remain governed under Canadian law and which could
be located outside the country?
Fear of the consequences of the Patriot Act resulted in the extension of the Scholars Portal
RefWorks service from 20 schools in Ontario to 60 or more schools across the country. OCUL
was well positioned to address the concerns of other academic institutions in Canada within a
very short timeframe because of its previous investment in developing a local infrastructure
governed under the laws of Ontario.
Present:
Concerns about ensuring local control of personal data have diminished but not disappeared.
At the same time that we see students sharing more and more personal details about their lives
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on social networking sites, we are dealing also with new directives from the provincial
government requiring us to pay closer attention to securing the private information we collect in
our interactions with those same students.
Future:
Perhaps OCUL should re-confirm whether, for the foreseeable future, personal user data
collected and managed by Scholars Portal services should remain on servers housed under
OCUL’s control in Ontario. This would also mean that any move of Scholars Portal toward a
cloud-based computing infrastructure would be conditional on guarantees from cloud providers
that data collected from our users will remain on servers in Canada even if that data were no
longer housed on servers physically managed by Scholars Portal.
Is there a need to compare FIPPA policies on each campus?
6: Supporting a shared infrastructure based at the University of Toronto is the most
efficient way to provide these services to all the OCUL schools. Cloud computing
facilities must be based in Canada before Scholars Portal can consider using these as
an alternative to hosted servers at the University of Toronto.
Past:
The shared infrastructure at University of Toronto was a condition of OIT funding and allowed
OCUL to build Scholars Portal on the foundation of the Science Server system already in place
at U of T.
Present:
The shared infrastructure at U of T provides a clear ownership and management structure as
well as providing a focus for staffing.
The Service Level Agreement between OCUL and U of T was set up when the Scholars Portal
project was launched. It needs to be renegotiated to reflect Scholars Portal growth in the past
10 years.
Future:
Is this still the best model going forward? There are now many more options for cloud
computing that would not require maintenance of a dedicated computing facility at the University
of Toronto. But how important does it remain that those computing facilities be housed entirely
in Canada and remain free from application of the Patriot Act.?
Also there is some interest in distributing local infrastructures. As a complement to the
infrastructure at U of T, schools with appropriate infrastructure could be called upon to host
certain systems. Further, software agreements for tools such as Mark Logic might be renegotiated for sharing across the consortium and we could collaborate with the same tools used
at Scholars Portal. In the context of ODESI, the local Nesstar installations could be leveraged
to distribute load and traffic throughout the province.
OCUL needs to provide strategic direction with regard to the location and management of
shared infrastructure.
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7: Scholars Portal is a cooperative endeavour of OCUL and OCUL should maintain
control of it at a governance level; others can ride on the “bus” but OCUL should
“drive” it. The advantages of keeping control of Scholars Portal versus the risks of
expanding the governance model to include institutions outside Ontario or the
higher-education sector in Ontario mean that the status quo is the right governance
model for Scholars Portal.
Any extension of Scholars Portal outside OCUL should be on a cost recovery basis
and should not change the existing governance structure.
Past:
The entire cost of the Scholars Portal budget, less contributions from the government, has been
borne by the OCUL schools. By definition, this has put a limit on Scholars Portal growth – that
is, no bigger than OCUL can afford. While OCUL explored business development opportunities
about five years ago, non-OCUL clients were engaged almost exclusively for the RefWorks
service. When ODESI was launched, a few libraries expressed interest in participation; given
uncertainty about data licenses at the time, this was not a high priority for OCUL to pursue.
Present:
There may be a few more schools in Canada or beyond interested in a client server relationship
with OCUL for one or more Scholars Portal services. But keeping non-OCUL schools, who
might want to be fully engaged with Scholars Portal services, outside of the governance model
for Scholars Portal will continue to limit the growth of Scholars Portal across Canada. Feedback
through collegial relations in various venues has lead OCUL to conclude that other consortia are
not looking for fellow libraries to act as service providers; rather, they are seeking partners in
the common goal of building the next generation of library services.
Although Scholars Portal staff gets almost weekly requests from non-OCUL schools to access
one or other Scholars Portal service, we continue to discourage these requests since there is no
model for opening up governance of Scholars Portal beyond OCUL.
Future:
At the same time, OCUL members are challenged to devote additional resources to growing
Scholars Portal services. While funding for new projects has been available from the province
since 2007, as our experience with OntarioBuys proves, OCUL members are concerned about
supporting the sustainability costs of these projects, once funding has expired.
What should OCUL do to leverage its investment in Scholars Portal? Do we need a new
strategy to spread support costs to other libraries in Canada? To do this, should OCUL consider
how its current governance model for Scholars Portal could be changed in order to remove
current limitations?
OCUL would also need to consider jurisdictional issues that might have an impact on growth.
One Ontario ministry is responsible for all Ontario universities. Collaborative efforts with libraries
in other sectors, such as has been done with Knowledge Ontario, has been difficult given the
challenges of working with decision-makers in several ministries and municipal government
structures. Working with colleges in Ontario brings its own post-secondary political challenges.
Collaborating outside Ontario would involve libraries that are governed by other provinces.
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Are there useful examples of larger collaborations with appropriate governance models that
could be emulated?
Internal communication challenges already exist and these need to be addressed. Providing
timely information about Scholars Portal developments to OCUL members; ensuring that
members have sufficient opportunities to contribute to planning and decisions; balancing the
need to inform and be informed with everyone’s busy schedules and overloaded email boxes –
these are all areas where changes are needed. Without improved communications, this would
be even more difficult in a larger arrangement.
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How can we take steps to improve communication now and better engage existing
groups in conversations and decision making?
Does the existing governance model work?
Would we accept the current level of communication from a vendor?
8: Scholars Portal should not aim to simply maintain existing services but should be
a force for innovation within OCUL and an innovation fund should be maintained to
support that role.
Past:
We have been able to grow Scholars Portal in some exciting and interesting new ways, but with
growth come increasing ongoing costs, and OCUL members have necessarily made careful
decisions each time new services were developed. The ODESI, E-Books and Geospatial Portal
projects have all been supported by the OCUL New Initiatives Fund.
Present:
There has been a concern among OCUL members about the long term sustainability costs of
Scholars Portal if it continues to grow and innovate. Is a New Initiatives Fund appropriate when
sustainability costs may not be supportable under current library budgets or at the very least are
points of concern each time a funded project in Scholars Portal moves to sustainability mode?
On the other hand, current uncertainty about OCUL’s commitment to ongoing funding of
Scholars Portal puts a damper on creativity and innovation within existing services.
Future:
How innovative do we want to be? How innovative can we be given the current staffing levels
and economic forecasts?
Scholars Portal needs a clear indication from OCUL on how aggressive it wants to be in terms
of continuing to pursue new, innovative services versus maintaining existing services. Should
new services be funded only if an older service is decommissioned?
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