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IPTC

Institutional Profiling Final Report and Executive Summary (pdf document, 292kb)

This JISC-funded scoping study considers the functional requirements for two components of the Information Environment that have been identified in the Shared Services Development Plan, but have not yet been fully addressed. These components are:

• an Institutional Profiling service which resolvers will inspect to discover information on institutional services, and preferences for OpenURL resolution;
• a Terms and Conditions service which provides machine-readable information about rights held in resources in the JISC Information Environment (IE).

The main tasks are to re-examine the roles of these services within the shared services model, and formulate concrete proposals for their practical implementation.

Background

The architectural model developed for the JISC Information Environment envisages a set of shared services to provide an infrastructure to support the range of associated services that together provide the link between content and presentation. These shared services are typically at one remove from the user, and are accessed indirectly by means of machine-to-machine interfaces.

While the two services which are the subject of this study are logically distinct, in practical terms it may be sensible to reconsider the requirements in broader terms. There are two distinct strands: Institutional Services, and Licence Data.

Institutional services

This refers to information about services and service contacts offered by the institution. These might include:

1. Addresses of institutional services accessed by machine-to-machine interfaces.
2. Basic contact information (formal institution name, postal address; telephone, fax, and email details)
3. Other web pages (staff list, Library URL, site search facility)

Ideally, in all cases, the information would be in a form suitable for machine-to-machine processing. In the case of web pages, however, the information will simply be available as human-readable text. The extent to which this function could be accommodated by the JISC IE Service Registry (IESR) will be considered.

Licenced services

This is the key to solving the appropriate copy problem, the problem of directing a user who has discovered the existence of a resource (such as a journal article), to a copy of the resource available to him by virtue of institutional licence. The core technology used here is the OpenURL, and the service which directs the user to the appropriate copy is the OpenURL resolver. The various possible ways in which the institution's licensing information can be provided to its OpenURL resolver service will be considered.

Note that in addition to the appropriate copy issue, institutions are facing a growing problem in managing the administration of their electronic holdings, and a number of initiatives are underway to develop suitable metadata that can model the administrative workflow in this area. Commercial rights management products may eventually provide a solution, but should be judged against a known set of institutional criteria.