.........Sorry about cross postings......

We are trying to find another implementation site for our forthcoming 
and agred European project. The text below will give you some idea of 
what we are trying to do. If you are interested or know of anyone who 
might be, please let me or Robin Yeates know. It may be that the 
CaseLibrary software would be the most attractive aspect for some. 
There is money available for staff and equipment (NT server and 
software) and travel (probably Florence/Athens/Madrid or even the 
Elephant and Castle)

The EU official synopsis is at
http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/projects/candle.html

The CaseLibrary site and the Edited
Final Report are at http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/caselib/reports.html

Notes for publishers follow.

 The sort of library interested would be a university or similar in 
which networking of electronic resources is growing and which uses 
standards such as TCP/IP, Windows, Novell or 
Windows NT and is looking to manage access and use. Preferably 
already using SilverPlatter or similar services. Interest in Thomson 
/ Chapman & Hall journals would be useful too.

--
from Mark Pierce, EnWare to publishers...

I will try to give a decent description from my point of view
so that everyone can add their comments and critisism until we reach a
point that everyone agrees to the overall idea of where were going. 
The project itself will define the details.

Given: 

1) University libraries with varying infrastructures, needs and
desires. Each library will have it's own list of publishers with whom
they wish to work. Each library has an existing infrastructure and 
plans for maintaining that infrastructure.
2) One principal and some secondary e-publishers who ****wish to work
with the libraries for distribution of their resources***** and to 
receive their
rightful benefits from their work. Each publisher has existing technical
and
business procedures which must be respected.
3) An existing resource control system which needs updating and wider
network capability (Cactus).
4) An indepth knowledge of Z39.50 and an existing  good client
(ZNavigator).
5) Knowledge through documented project such as Decomate, TECUP, etc.
and a
great deal of experience in library operations, publishing and the
intersecting areas between these two.
6) Some funding and the strong desire to build a successsful commercial
product.

Situation:

A user with rights to resources (Let's say that she is a biologist doing
a study in nutrition for trout farming) is sitting in front a a 
screen showingaccess icons to the resources to which she has rights. 
One of those icons says "Electronic Library". The user may or may not 
care where the documentscome from. She definitely cares how much she 
or the University has to pay for it and she will
want to get the best quality documents possible in the least amount of
time. By quality we will mean the information 
which satisfies most closely the particular area that she is 
studying. She will
also need to know what the restrictions are on the reuse of information
that
she gathers, since she is planning to publish a report which hopefully
will
earn sufficient money or image to fund her institute over the next few
months and she doesn't need the legal problems.

She double-clicks on the "Electronic Library" and gets a standard
windows
application. 

1) Once in the application, she lauches a very specific search against a
series of servers at her sponsor library and across the Internet and
obtains
a short list of documents that seem to suit her needs.

2) She then clicks the "Holdings" button for her sponsor library system.
If
the server which informed her of the document she wants also gave her
the
ISBN and/or DOI, the system  tries to inform her of the availability and
cost of the document. The possible responses might include: a) It is
available electronically from the sponsors collection, associated
publishers, etc in format A and at cost X b) It's in the physical
printed
collection of the sponsor c) It's available by ILL d) Unknown.

3) She has located the document and needs to know the usage rights. She
clicks on the "Rights" button. The application contacts a DOI server
that
reports the universally recognised rights on the particular document.

4) In the best of situations, the holdings reported electronic access to
the
full document through the sponsor library in a format that she knows how
to
handle, she agrees to the cost and rights restrictions. She then pulls
down
the document, saves it locally and continues her work.

5) In the meantime the server has collected the usage statistics,
recorded
the transaction both internally and with the respective publisher for
standard billing and reporting procedures.

Observations:

The above description is futuristic but not all that futuristic. The
tecnology is mostly there. It's just a matter of getting enough time and
money to put it together. Our job now is to decide how much of the above
we
can realistically do with the money and infrastructure we have
available.

The sequence above ignores human language problems, lack of homogeneity
in
the metadata retrieved. It implies the existence of of a universal DOI
service and of a "local" server that knows about the holdings that the
sponsor library owns. It also implies the existence of detailed digital
information and metadata from a variety of sources. This server must
have
some way to search and perhaps cache all of the servers of the "local"
system and that of all contracted servers from the various publishers
with
whom the sponsor library has contracted. It must maintain it's knowledge
up
to date, not just the documentary information but also the related 
business
information.

Proposal:

1) Adapt the ZNavigator  to handle functionality that we decide that we
can
pay for.
.
2) Adapt a Z39.50 server (Zebra?) to: 

a)  receive (cache) gatherer data where the gatherer uses plugin modules
to
search particular interfaces (read publisher site). 

and/or

b) maintain a "Collections" file which allows "pass-through" of the
search
queries to other servers listed as pertaining to the "Collection".





----------------



-- 
Robin Yeates
Senior Researcher/Centre Manager
Library Information Technology Centre (LITC)
South Bank University
103 Borough Rd, London SE1 0AA
UK
email: [log in to unmask]
tel  : +44(0)171 815 7871 (direct, voicemail)
       +44(0)171 815 7872 (switchboard)
fax  : +44(0)171 815 7050
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