No. 122, November 2001

Mr. Koch gave a presentation
on Subject Gateway

On October 29, 2001, Mr. Traugott Koch, Senior Librarian and Digital Library Scientist at the Development Lab, Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark (DTV) and at NetLab, Lund University Libraries, Sweden, gave a presentation on subject gateway to the staff of the National Diet Library.

Mr. Traugott Koch

Mr. Koch visited Japan to participate in the "International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001" (DC-2001)  held in Tokyo. He is a digital library specialist and more than 50 staff from various divisions listened attentively to his presentation, "Cooperating Subject Gateways as an element of a digital library service. Metadata profiling, classification mapping and the Renardus broker". For the complete contents of the presentation, please see <http://www.lub.lu.se/tk/renardus/tokyo0110.html>

First, he introduced the functions of the subject gateway as one of the important components of a digital library. Subject gateways correspond to traditional library functions. Quality selection, description and cataloging, classification and indexing, annotation and recommendation, searching and browsing in catalogs are the functions that a gateway carries out for digital resources on the net. But subject gateways transcend the limitations of their predecessors by offering catalogs of Internet resources which are not part of locally stored collections, and by integrating mediation, discovery and direct access and retrieval of documents. The importance of subject gateways for libraries is closely connected to the question of the future role of libraries.

Subject gateways are Internet-based discovery services, addressing the shortcomings of the large search engines. They can be developed cheaply and are well suited to cooperation. As an example of subject gateways, he introduced EELS, Engineering E-Library, Sweden <http://eels.lub.lu.se/>. The EELS is one of the oldest gateways. It was created in 1993, it still exists and has been further developed.

In the second part, he outlined the EU funded Renardus <http://www.renardus.org/>, a collaborative project that aims to improve academic users' access to a range of exciting Internet-based information services across Europe. The National Library of the Netherlands is coordinator of this project and Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom and Germany are participant countries. The Renardus broker is a "meta subject gateway", which allows several subject gateways to be searched at the same time. Through the Renardus, the EELS, mentioned earlier, and other major subject gateways are searchable. An evaluation of a pilot version will be undertaken during fall 2001, and the fully operational service is due to be launched in June 2002.

Objectives of this project are to provide access to distributed, heterogeneous and quality-controlled subject gateways (high quality metadata collections), to cover Europe via a single interface, to achieve cross-search and cross browse, to make a decentralized solution, and to develop and/or define organizational and business models, technical solutions and metadata standards. The Renardus uses Dublin Core Metadata Elements as description rule and the Dewey Decimal Classification for cross-searching and cross browsing between different gateways.

After the presentation, Mr. Koch and the staff of the Electronic Library Development Office had a meeting. Issues discussed at the meeting were the need for metadata application profile, authority control in subject gateways, granularity of resource to describe, and system architecture. Since the National Diet Library also is developing a kind of subject gateway service, it was a meaningful experience to have a meeting with Mr. Koch, a specialist in this field.

Mr. Koch with the staff of the Electronic Library Development Office