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The State of Discovery-NISO Plus
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The State of Discovery-NISO Plus
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Segment:0 .
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Good evening and welcome to the session on The State of Discovery for NISO Plus 2022. I'm Athena Hoeppner from the University of Central Florida and I will be your moderator for the evening. We're going to have two presentations by six different presenters and then we will follow that with a question and answer and discussion session, and I think we should be having a very lively discussion because we got some great material for tonight.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: So the first session will be The User Journey to Discovery Tips for Content Providers with presenters Magaly Bascones with OpenAthens, Getaneh Alemu from Solent University and Kieran Prince from OpenAthens. And I apologize to the presenters if I mispronounced any of your names. Then we'll follow that with Trekking into the Semantic Frontier with Ashley Faith from EBSCO, Lisa Hopkins from Texas A&M University, and Daniel Eller from Oral Roberts University.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And with that, I'm going to pass it over to the presenters and then afterward, be sure to click on the link to join us in the chat for the Q&A and discussion.
MAGALY BASCONES: Good morning. I'm very glad to be here today and present with Kieran and Gataneh what we believe are the tips that will help content providers to improve the user journey to discovery. There are two main types of content providers. They one closer to the creation of the knowledge through editorial activities and the one who select content from different sources and aggregate them on a single digital space.
MAGALY BASCONES: Both types of content providers have a task of dissemination. In the digital communication space, this happens to platforms where the content is made available. This could be beautiful shelf by academic subjects or in rich databases that contain a mix of several content types that the content provider there is a for profit or not for profit organization or that they work under an open access or a subscription based model, don't change anything on the technical side of things.
MAGALY BASCONES: Digital publishing is a big enterprise where content providers are asked to provide digital services and solutions, access management, metadata supply, discovery statistics, accessibility, interoperability, integration with various technology setups and respond to customer-specific specific economic, political, and technological requirements. In addition to all that are most relevant to our presentation, content providers are requested to provide a user journey.
MAGALY BASCONES: The user journey, we all understand what it is, we all think that it's a good idea to know more about it. Content providers know that is essential. The user journey tell them a story. The story of how user interacts with the content types and how intuitive an interface is. When they start discovery as the actions that allows library and users to interact with relevant content that they don't know about, the user journey to discovery will tell content providers a broader story.
MAGALY BASCONES: We tell them where an end user, a student, a researcher, a teacher, et cetera start their journey, which path they take and what they do next. There are more and more studies about the use of journals in libraries. Here are a couple of examples, including this student journey map presented by Caroline Gould from the University of Melbourne.
MAGALY BASCONES: This studies focus on understanding how libraries are helping or attracting users from the process of discovery. One of the conclusions is that the user journeys to discovery are not an A to B experience, they're a cycle. All the scholars say communication is. We are humans, and naturally, we are adverse to frustration and time wasting. A journey full of dead ends, uncharted paths, and traffic controls will soon discourage end users, affect user engagement and content discovery.
MAGALY BASCONES: If the content is not discovered, this affect users. Obviously, content providers want their content to be discovered but it's not enough for them to put the content available in an organized manner on their platform. Discoverability requires that the platform are interconnected with the rest of the end user digital ecosystem. The three tips that we have today on how to make content more discoverable and how to contribute to an enriching and user journey to discovery.
MAGALY BASCONES: Let's start by the first ones, distribution. It's where the users are. It sounds pretty obvious but the trick is to identify where actually the users are and how you can manage to be there. Let's see. Studies and experience on Discovery journeys tell us that end-user started discovery journeys on places like Google, Google Scholar, indexing services, library and discovery services, et cetera.
MAGALY BASCONES: It has been told as well that all kinds of users may use Google but the journey to discovery doesn't stop there. We know that discovery the results as well an element of luck finding. This means that distribution of publication information is a very important task for content providers. It is important the content providers work with as many discovery starting points as possible, starting with the most general ones and the one relevant to the subject areas.
MAGALY BASCONES: But how to do this? Publication information take the form of metadata. Make your metadata open and freely available, make it available on your platform, put in place metadata exchange agreements. Even if most of this exchange will be free of charge, don't give away your content information without having an agreement with the recipient. Use this agreement to establish when, how, and in which formats the metadata will be distributed and what the recipient will do and can do with it.
MAGALY BASCONES: Make sure that your delivery is the best possible quality. Don't forget, once it is distributed, it is out of your control and correcting in publication information is nearly impossible. Communicate. Make sure that your customers know about what you're doing and why you have committed in terms of distribution. Discovery services, Google, indexing services, work with a large amount of content providers.
MAGALY BASCONES: Sued publication information will be treated as one more in a long queue of requests. As a content provider, you can guarantee to your customers that their knowledge bases and discovery services will ingest your data in a timely manner. The only thing you can confirm and guarantee to your customers is that you are distributing it at the best of your abilities. Distributing publication information is a costly task.
MAGALY BASCONES: Don't underestimate this aspect. You need time, systems in place, and especially patience. Thank you.
GATANEH ALEMU: Hello, hi. This is Gataneh Alemu from Solent University, a Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian. And today, following on from Magaly, I'm going to present on The Role of Metadata for Discovery and some tips for content providers. So as most of you know, metadata is essential for search, discovery, relevancy ranking, refinement, grouping of related resources.
GATANEH ALEMU: And everything that content providers do depend in one way or another on the metadata present. Of course, without metadata and without the bibliographic control, such as cataloging description of resources, most of information will be a chaos. So today, I'm going to just provide in this presentation some tips on what content providers need to do in relation to metadata.
GATANEH ALEMU: One of the tips is to create a user centered or a usable metadata. IFLA, one of the standards organizations, in its reference models and FERPA and LRM, identifies use what's called user tasks such as finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining, and exploring resources. So these are more user focused tasks.
GATANEH ALEMU: So the metadata that you create need to cater to these user tasks of finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining. So in finding-- so what metadata elements, attributes, and relationships could enable the users to search, find, or retrieve information resources? What are the attributes and relationships of a given work, expression, manifestation, or item, in IFLA's LRM terms, that allow users to find a resource?
GATANEH ALEMU: So any metadata decision needs to put the user in mind. This relates to metadata that helps users to find related resources. So to identify those metadata elements that are relevant to find a resource. To identify a resource, what are the elements and relationships? What are the minimal set of attributes sufficient to differentiate one resource to the other in terms of edition or title, date of publication, distribution, series, statement, et cetera?
GATANEH ALEMU: Selecting-- once identified, what are the metadata elements that help users to filter and select relevant resources, and finally obtaining the resource itself, which helps users to access and utilize the information resource. But of course, explore is the ability to allow users to navigate and discover related information resources. So in all this, metadata is key for distribution, visibility, discoverability, accessibility, service and usage.
GATANEH ALEMU: Some of the user behavior studies conducted shows that users tend to use simple search instead of, for example, advanced search, which used to be the case in old library discovery interfaces. So more and more users tend to use simple search. So we need to capture the metadata towards that kind of simple search approach.
GATANEH ALEMU: And of course, users also tend to use fewer words in their search. So the number of words, for example, as we find out in Solent University discovery interface, about nearly 40% of the users use two keywords, like "human resources," "events management," "critical thinking." This also complies with other research conducted, for example, by OCLC on how users search on Google, so two keywords.
GATANEH ALEMU: Of course, standards are key. So stick to standards, is another tip. The standards, the metadata standards, provide the metadata structure, for example, by providing metadata elements, metadata encoding rules, controlled vocabularies. And they provide granularity, the level of detail that's required in metadata. It provides the metadata provenance, which is about, what's the metadata?
GATANEH ALEMU: Where does it come from, the context, the history, the ownership. Metadata standards also provide the kind of framework for metadata quality by providing the accuracy, consistency, and ensuring whether the metadata is correct. And also, it provides a kind of simplicity. Of course, simplicity could be more about interface. But still, it's a relevant concept, it is, for standards.
GATANEH ALEMU: It ensures-- standards provide interoperability. The challenge-- but of course, also the opportunity-- is there are lots of metadata standards out there. In fact, the old adage, which says, the good thing about standards is there are too many to choose from. Depending on your business or your business model or the type of organization you are, there are various methods and standards to pick and choose.
GATANEH ALEMU: One of the standards that libraries use, because I work in library and in a library-- is RDA, Resource Description and Access standard, which provides a more richer description and support the IFLA tasks of finding, identifying, obtaining, and storing information. It also is intuitive for catalogers, of course, but also provides a more richer description and allows to differentiate one word from another.
GATANEH ALEMU: So I would say stick to RDA at the moment, because it also provides the ability to cross-link related works. Another tip is create-- ensure your metadata is quality assured. Of course, there are various facets to quality, like compatibility, completeness, up-to-dateness, consistency, usefulness, credibility, refinement, et cetera, multilinguality.
GATANEH ALEMU: All these are tied in one way or another with metadata quality. But to be more precise, ensure the values, the metadata values, as well as the metadata elements and fields are standardized and accurate, well-formed, complete, accurate, correct. So invest your resources in ensuring metadata quality, because there is no point in having inaccurate or incorrect metadata, which means no discoverability, no findability, no refinement.
GATANEH ALEMU: The other important tip, probably, is also include essential metadata elements. NISO, for example included this-- recommends some metadata elements that are essential, such as title, name, dates, book identifiers, subjects. Of course, also using clear, consistent titles, using name authorities, like standardized authorities, standardized dates, identifiers, such as ISBN, ISSN, the DOI, et cetera.
GATANEH ALEMU: Another organization, NAG, the National Acquisitions Group in the UK, also provided some essential metadata elements, which also comply, actually, with NISO's, about title information, author information, publication information, et cetera. As you can see on the right, this is a marked standard in the metadata field, and the search field is required.
GATANEH ALEMU: Some of them are essential. Some of them are desirable. Some of them are system-generated. Some of them are created by catalogers, metadata people. Also be consistent on your titles and subtitles, because I think, again, as a cataloger and metadata librarian, I found sometimes difficult, for example, to group related editions and related versions of books because of omissions of, for example, the subtitle.
GATANEH ALEMU: Or sometimes some articles, like the "a," the "a," the "an," are different from edition to edition. As you can see, for example, here, one of the titles has-- one of the editions has Communication and Interpersonal Skills for All Nurses. The other, it says Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Nursing. It might be a very minor difference. But for systems and for discovery systems, there is no way to differentiate between the two.
GATANEH ALEMU: So the system would consider these two editions of a book as different works. But in fact, in actuality, they are a different edition of the same book. So mind your articles, your conjunctions, the Oxford comma, et cetera. Another tip would be, enrich your metadata. Be specific. Be granular.
GATANEH ALEMU: Use this structure in your description. The specificity of the subjects, concrete subjects instead of general subjects, that's another tip. The more metadata or access points, the better. In fact, RDA, for example, the Resource Description and Access, omits the rule of three and says, if you have the time and the resource, add as much details, as much authors as possible, as much access points as possible in your metadata.
GATANEH ALEMU: The more metadata is better. And finally, just to conclude, these are-- let me tell you the tips I would give you as a takeaway. Create user-centered, usable, specific, consistent, accurate, and complete metadata. Stick to metadata standards, because that's what we use in libraries. That's what in many institutions, whether in academic or research libraries.
GATANEH ALEMU: Keep the metadata enriched and user-focused, user-centered. Save the time of the user. In fact, back to the Ranganathan's five laws of library science, saving the time of the user is an important criteria. Enhance discovery through metadata. And then you can maximize usage and impact. There is a known investment through metadata.
GATANEH ALEMU: And in general, enriched, linked, opened, and usable metadata of data means maximizing your usage and impact and discovery. Thank you very much for the opportunity today. And I hope if you have questions, you can ask. Thank you very much.
KIERAN PRINCE: Good afternoon, good evening, everybody. My name is Kieran. I'm a business development manager OpenAthens. Working at OpenAthens, we're aware of some of the challenges users, libraries, and publishers all face with regards to accessing digital content. So today I'll be talking about federated authentication and discovery, and hopefully identify where the challenges and opportunities lie. And there's a real theme of standards across both mine and Getaneh's presentation today.
KIERAN PRINCE: So hopefully you'll have some takeaways from that respect as well. So just a quick introduction to OpenAthens-- we're an identity and access management service that have been providing services to the research and academic community for over 25 years. We were the first federated authentication service in the world and now work with over 2,600 libraries and publishers in over 75 countries.
KIERAN PRINCE: And OpenAthens came to be all those decades ago largely in response to the change in user needs, needs that are still evolving today. So users were starting to access more material online. And over the last few decades, the concept of a digital identity has been developed. And with that, personalization is a key part of providing any online service. And as a publisher, you can build a profile of your customers, while users benefit from that tailored experience.
KIERAN PRINCE: When we talk about discovery, the impact of mobiles cannot be underplayed. Although more in-depth analysis may not take place on mobile devices, they are certainly used for research and discovery. And giving users the ability to log on from any device from any location with a single username and password is one of the reasons federated authentication has expanded globally.
KIERAN PRINCE: Mobile access provides a real challenge for some of the IP-based authentication services used today, and federated authentication is far more agnostic in these types of scenarios. It's also worth noting that demand for remote access to resources will more than likely be here to stay. We had a huge kind of explosion in demand for access to digital resources remotely, both from publishers and libraries, over the last 18 months.
KIERAN PRINCE: And we don't expect that to change. I think that the hybrid model will be used both in corporate settings, but also in education settings as well. And more universities are providing remote services across the globe. So having remote access enabled on your platform is really key. So the federated login journey-- so at OpenAthens, we're mostly concerned with federated login, and it can be simplified with this cycle here.
KIERAN PRINCE: It's easier to think about federated login as just a single sign-on. And within that, there are three main user journeys-- navigating the publisher website, navigating the library website, so going through a library portal, and accessing through discovery services, things like EBSCO and ProQuest. It's the latter where federated login can provide both a challenge and an opportunity.
KIERAN PRINCE: So we'll take a quick look at these three user journeys. And it's also worth noting Shibboleth, that this applies to Shibboleth as well, and other federated authentication methods. The thing with SAML is it's interoperable, so yeah. But the concept applies across the board. So WAYF, or Where Are You From, is a key concept within federated authentication.
KIERAN PRINCE: We understand discovery as part of the research journey, but within the federated authentication space, WAYFs are used to provide organizational discovery, so slightly different to the term "discovery" that's used in kind of research. If a user navigates to publisher website, a resource provider needs to know who they are. So a WAYF allows the user to log in, to search for their library, and log in at their home or organization.
KIERAN PRINCE: The reason they have to do this is because a key concept within SAML or OpenAthens-- so SAML more widely-- is that libraries are doing the authentication. OpenAthens, Shibboleth handles the authentication on the library side. So as a publisher, you're just doing the authorization. So we're telling you who a user is, and then you're doing the authorization. What can they access?
KIERAN PRINCE: Again, this is-- there are standards approach to WAYFs. Things like avoiding lists and having a dynamic search bar are overall recommendations that can help you improve your WAYF. Again, standards-- so standardization is key. Federated authentication is built on SAML, which is a standard protocol for authentication. So it generally doesn't matter what vendor or software the library or publisher is using as long as there is a focus on that standardization above everything else.
KIERAN PRINCE: Some things that are standardized include the language. We use things like "Access through your institution," rather than listing some types of vendors, so avoiding listing things like that. As with shibboleths, it's agnostic, so things like "Access through your institution" are much more standardized, The position of that Log in button generally in the top right-hand side of the page, and helpful error messaging.
KIERAN PRINCE: So if the user doesn't have a subscription, they hit a dead end. Having some helpful messaging rather than just having a dead end with no communication is recommended. Although SAML is a standard, again, like my colleague mentioned earlier, there are many standards to abide by. So one of our roles within the industry at OpenAthens is to try and enforce some of these standards.
KIERAN PRINCE: But again, there is a lot of variety out there. Just sticking to the recommended practices as much as you can is a really useful thing to do. When it comes to the user journeys, grouping access options is also best practice, again, for creating that standardized user journey. So users should not have to jump around the page to find where to log in. If they hit a paywall, if they do have access through their institution, that should be front and center.
KIERAN PRINCE: They shouldn't be kind of encouraged to go down that pay for this now route when there is access through your institution an option available. So at OpenAthens, we adopt the three-click rule. If a user has gone through huge amounts of effort to find an article, perhaps through a discovery service, and they want to engage with that article after reading the abstracts, it's really important to make sure it's easy for them to do that.
KIERAN PRINCE: So just an example here, you'll see, again, the abstract and the PDF are highlighted at the top. The access options are at the bottom of the page in this example. Once you go through those access options, there are, again, many more options. And then once you select your option, there is another list to pick from. So again, more than three clicks, access options are at the bottom of the page.
KIERAN PRINCE: So yeah, clearer signposting, SeamlessAccess attempts to address some of these challenges, which we'll talk about in this a bit later on. But yeah, it should be much more clearer whether the user has access and where they do have access to the content. So WAYFless and deep linking-- so where authentication and discovery services really overlap is when it comes to things like the WAYFless and deep linking.
KIERAN PRINCE: So from the three aforementioned user journeys, it's probably the most common users going through discovery services, but it's often the most frustrating for users. And that's because a lot of publishers still don't support deep linking. And what we mean by deep linking and WAYFless is kind of the article-level authentication. So the user is not going directly to your website.
KIERAN PRINCE: They're finding an article deep inside your website through a discovery service. If they don't have deep linking enabled on that platform, you can go through various user-- various login loops, where we want that user to get authenticated into that article and be able to read it without having to go through several hoops. So for an example here, I've took this full-text article from a discovery service.
KIERAN PRINCE: If a publisher doesn't support deep linking, I might just land at the home page of this particular website and have to go through another search, a search task. But when it comes to ClinicalKey in this example, they provide deep linking. So the actual result is I get direct access to that article with just a few clicks. So again, you can see how having to go through another process of searching for that article on a different platform-- you can see why that might be frustrating for users.
KIERAN PRINCE: So yeah, as fast access to that article as possible. Now, I can't speak about discovery and authentication without mentioning SeamlessAccess and GetFTR. So SeamlessAccess aims to address some of those core user experience challenges, so aims at standardizing that user login, particularly when you're navigating the publisher website. So having a consistent user journey, not having to find where the login button is, not having to find where the WAYF is or go through a list of organizations, it addresses some of those core UX challenges, which is a core challenge in the industry as a whole.
KIERAN PRINCE: While GetFTR addresses some of the challenges around accessing content through discovery services, so signposting articles that the user is able to access because they have a subscription. So again, taking away those dead ends where they've gone down a route to find an article, and they find out they don't have a subscription. So again, just industry-- these are community-led initiatives that we urge people to get involved with.
KIERAN PRINCE: I've seen-- SeamlessAccess, for example, people who have implemented it have done it to huge success. I think it does seem like a bit of a barrier to entry for certain-- that there is a barrier to entry for some of the smaller-based publishers. But again, OpenAthens is here to lower those barriers. We are integrated with SeamlessAccess. If you ever need support through that, we're here to help, because one of the challenges it doesn't address is the complexity around SAML.
KIERAN PRINCE: And that's the reason that OpenAthens exists. Both these initiatives are fully supported by NISO. And finally, just before I summarize, I just want to highlight the growth and scale of federated authentication. So the EU, for example, has been pumping money into Southeast Asia to build up network capabilities and provide federated authentication services in the region.
KIERAN PRINCE: So we've seen federations pop up in the region, all supported by SAML. So again, it's been highlighted and noted as the-- at least for the foreseeable future-- as the choice for authentication across the world. The benefit for you as a publisher is you have a global infrastructure that you can plug into. As long as you support SAML, you've got these federations all around the world with thousands of potential customers to plug into.
KIERAN PRINCE: And they all adopt by the same similar standards, and again, that's SAML. So in summary, user needs have changed. Over the last 25 years since we've been in business, they certainly have. And even over the last 18 months, they've changed even more. So being aware of user needs and their behaviors is really important.
KIERAN PRINCE: So yeah, speak to librarians and speak to users to get a feel for those users' needs and behaviors. Remote access is here to stay, and with that, more mobile accessibility is essential. When it comes to WAYFs, we recommend avoiding less. Maybe consider WAYF Finder or the SeamlessAccess WAYF. They abide by the same kind of recommended practices and, again, are much more standardized. So the UX, User Experience, is an industry-wide challenge, and standards are possibly the answer.
KIERAN PRINCE: We'll never get everybody to abide by one single standard, but we can get very close to that. Grouping access options helps with that user experience, and think about that three-click rule. Does your site support the three-click rule? If not, reach out and find some user experience experts out there. We have our own, but there are others out there in the market. Deep linking and WAYFless are essential.
KIERAN PRINCE: Although they're not mandated by a lot of providers, they are absolutely essential, as key a part as logging on the website directly through a WAYF. So yeah, they're absolutely essential. We urge you to take part in industry initiatives, particularly SeamlessAccess and GetFTR. And again, yeah, federated authentication is growing, so there's real opportunities to be found, particularly in these new markets across Southeast Asia.
KIERAN PRINCE: Thank you.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: My name is Ashleigh Faith. I am a librarian data scientist here at EBSCO, and I am also the Director of Platform Data and Visualization. All right, so thank you for joining us. Today we are going to be talking about trekking into the semantic frontier, and we're going to explain a little bit about what that actually means. So the introduction here is semantic search, something that we've been talking about for decades.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: It's surprising to say that at this point, but it's so true. And it means that you're finding whatever you want with whatever word you want, and that is without barrier. And I don't know if we're quite there yet. There are a lot of new technology pieces out there that the library community may or may not be aware of that are really going to push this forward. So the first one is the linked data standards.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So you'll see W3C, RDF, SKOS, SPARQL. All of those things are helping us really use data in a way that we've never been able to do before. The next part is a knowledge graph, which is kind of predicated on some of those same standards. But think of it more of like a crosswalk, but with a many-to-many type of relationship. This is something that a lot of different markets are using, but the library community doesn't talk about it a whole lot.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So the question here is, how can this actually help us with some of our search and subject problems that we see today? So let's dig in and find out.
LISA HOPKINS: Hi, I'm Lisa Hopkins. I am actually the Head of Technical Services at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. And I came to the library world as a cataloger, so I do have a shift at the reference desk, a couple a week. And I really approach my reference shifts from this point of view, from knowing the back end, the nuts and bolts. So when I see a student approaching the library reference desk, I know it's probably one of two kinds of students.
LISA HOPKINS: There's the student that comes in, plops down, thoroughly discouraged because they've spent the entire weekend looking for an article. They're supposed to have 10, and they can't even find one. So what I do with that student is I say, OK, what search terms are you using, and where are you using them? And I replicate their search exactly so that I, one, can see what they're doing and see what they're seeing, but also so that I can sort of transform that search in front of them.
LISA HOPKINS: Usually their search is a phrase. It's very closed and very narrow. So I back up a little bit, open it up, and show them how sort of unlocking that search will start to open up the search. And we will then follow the search paths. The second student we are all familiar with sits down with this overwhelmed look because they don't even know where to start.
LISA HOPKINS: They haven't even formed the concepts they want. And this student and I, we travel down this word adventure, because what I do is turn away from the monitor at that point, and I say, OK, why don't you just talk to me about your research? And I have a pen and a paper, and I just started jotting words down as they're describing what they're interested in, what they're researching.
LISA HOPKINS: When I have about 5 to 10 words, I then show them how we can start plugging those into the keyword search. And they start to realize that they don't have to have this polished concept. I become like a translator from where they started to where they can go. And it really unlocks their idea of what they wanted to do and opens it up.
LISA HOPKINS: And then we then start the search and travel down the paths that the searches lead us. I feel like I'm a translator, and rather than just writing down synonyms, I'm really trying to find concepts from what they're saying. I make it look so easy, and it can be for them too if they can back up and learn from the search box how they can expand their own searches.
LISA HOPKINS: One of the things that we can do is as I'm expanding that search and showing them how to step back, I'm using EBSCO's recommended searches. I'm saying, see, once you start typing this in, EBSCO is going to recommend other search terms. Use that because that's going to open up more articles for you. Librarians aren't always there, so at some point, the student needs to learn themselves.
LISA HOPKINS: It needs to be obvious how they make that gap from where they are to where we want them to be and where they want to be.
DANIEL ELLER: Hi, my name is Daniel Eller, and I am the Electronic Resource Librarian at Oral Roberts University, and I also teach information literacy classes to the behavioral sciences and some others. So one of my central concerns is when I'm looking at trekking into this new semantic frontier is knowing where we're going and also being able to explain that journey to others. I think, for librarians, transparency is paramount if we're going to be part of mapping out this journey.
DANIEL ELLER: A large part of what we do is teach information literacy. Understanding how query expansion and enhanced subject precision can help us requires that we are able to teach others how it works and how their search results and resources are generated. The king of natural language is obviously Google, and that doesn't offer much transparency when students use it. They have a mixed bag of results, and sometimes they get exactly what they want and they're happy, but they don't know why it generated it or how it generated it.
DANIEL ELLER: And that's not very helpful for librarians. In a lot of ways, Google is a black box. And we as librarians, I think we need to take care when we're teaching how this works that we ourselves don't create black boxes, that we understand the process that brought us to this. So we still love our filters so that we can explain to a student how Boolean operators impact these vocabulary, but we also don't want to always rehearse the same old thing.
DANIEL ELLER: We want the system to begin to learn from us and make these connections for us. But during that process, I think the huge thing is that we never lose the transparency, so that when we plug in a subject heading or a natural language term, and it's translated, that we can explain to the students every time why they're getting the results that they're getting, and it's not a mixed bag. So I think coming from the electronic resources, we see the filters that we have on the administrative end, on the back end.
DANIEL ELLER: But we are also aware of how we need to translate that to our reference librarians, and to our teachers, and most of all, how we need to work with the producers, like EBSCO and EDS and other producers, who are creating these algorithms, who are creating these data sets. And we need to be in constant dialogue so we know what's happening and we know how to tell our students what's happening, versus just surrendering our jobs over to another black box.
DANIEL ELLER: So I think that that's the key to this, is all working together and having these dialogues behind the scenes and being able to understand what's happening, and still have it be translated on the screen when the students are doing their searches and we're sitting down with them. So I think that that is the future, is a dialogue with us that's creating a better dialogue with the system and with the students.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So what we have heard from the wonderful folks on this call is where we are today and those frustrations that so many students have with subject search. And then we've heard from Daniel, where do we want to go? What's the desired state for semantic search, specifically for subjects in our library systems? So how can we introduce this application, this way of doing things into the library? One reason that we really want to talk about this from a standards perspective is libraries already use a lot of standards.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Like MARC records, for instance, are very standardized. In fact, if you wanted to do your own mapping of users' natural language from your specific library, you can do that. And there are specific MARC fields in order to do that. Now, I did mention in the beginning of this presentation that there are some new technologies you might want to explore. That is a knowledge graph.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So when you look at this from a user's perspective, because that's why we all are here, to help our users find information more easily, you'll see an example here, where if I type in "Maglev," that's my natural language. Maybe that's the word my professor used when they were describing the assignment to me. Well, we know that there are other words for this. There is a high-volume, natural language word that a lot of other students are using, which is "high-speed train." But we also know there are controlled vocabularies that may not actually agree with each other on what that word is.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So you'll see IEEE here uses a different word than the Library of Congress. You should not have to translate for every single database, every single publisher, and every single culture and geographic area. This is something that a knowledge graph-- if you are starting to map these together, you start with linked data, and then you map them together so that they are synonymous-- really helps in the search application.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: EBSCO has something called the Enhanced Subject Precision. This is exactly what it does. It expands the user's search into not only other natural language that mean the same thing, but also other subjects that mean the same thing. So looking at the actual technology behind the scenes, you may have heard of something called a taxonomy. That's a one-to-one mapping. And then you see a thesaurus.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: We are very familiar with that in libraries, and that adds a few more layers, and that is "see also" and "use for." Once you get into an ontology, that's where you start to include things that are more like "related to," but we're adding some substance to that, like "has a" and "part of." We get that naturally from the broader and narrower kinds of concepts that we have in our own vocabularies.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: But what we can start to do as librarians is actually sit down and think through, how are these two subjects related to one another? That's where we're not only just doing a translation between synonyms, but now we're helping a user that may not know what things are related to other things in a specific and semantic way. And that's why EBSCO has something else called the Concept Map, where you can see this in a visual representation.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So if I wanted to find out all of the adverse effects of a certain drug, I can actually look that up and see that drug and how it's related to adverse effects of taking it, or the capital city of a certain country that I am maybe doing a research paper on. All right, so let's see this in practice. So first we're going to look at how we can see query expansion in practice.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So let's say I was asked to do some research on the Battle of the Bulge. Here I can very clearly and transparently see where my query shows up. That's great. That is great confirmation for me to understand I did a good search. Now, let's look at something else, though.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: This subject right here, which is in bold, that's not exactly what I searched for. However, this is a synonym of Battle of the Bulge. So what is happening here is two things. First, I as a user am getting a better search because I'm not missing content just because I didn't use the, quote unquote, "right word." The second perk is, as a user, I have now learned that this is a synonym of Battle of the Bulge.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So now I have actually learned something, information literacy, that there are other subjects that mean the same thing, and I've learned what these two synonyms are. Now let's go to Concept Map, which is the next layer, where it is looking at how different concepts, different subjects, are related to one another. Think of it like all of these synonyms have been mapped together to form one circle, one node, in our knowledge graph and finding out how these two things have anything in common.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So here we are in the Concept Map. So let's start our search with "Java." Now, this is an interesting one because Java can actually mean a few different things. We have object oriented programming. We have a bunch of other things that mean Java. Java is an island. And here's some natural language at play. "Java" is also another word for "coffee." So you can see how the word "Java" has been mapped to a few different contexts.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Now, the reason we do this is we want to help the user understand, one, there are different contexts to some of their words that they might not realize. That will also help them in their regular EDS search. The second thing is we are helping the user understand which context they mean, so they don't get all the contexts in one search. So let's start our search here with the programming language. Now here you are seeing the visual interpretation of all those synonyms.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Those are all mapped under each of these circles on the screen. And now we can actually see how these things relate to one another. So we can see C++ is influenced. Java was influenced by the C++ programming language. Well, that's pretty cool. Now I understand not only the context of Java programming language, but I also now understand that Java had a heavy influence in C++.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: In fact, if I was a computer science student, this might actually be a great place to start my research. How is Java influenced by C++? If I wanted to do that I can add both of these to my search, and you can see that search building over here. Now, if I wanted to just get a sneak peek to make sure that I'm on the right track, I can look at the content preview. And so you can see here all of the different articles that I would get if I sent this query back to EDS.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: But let's say I want to add some more context to this. Let's say C. Since we see C++, maybe C is also something that has a connection. Yes, it is influenced by the language for C, but I don't know much about C the programming language. So let's explore that topic. Now I'm looking at the knowledge graph connected to the language for C, and I can see a lot more about that. Open programming language.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: You can see the definitions that are in each. And you can see which discipline or domain that it's from. And you can continue to do your search this way. So if we wanted to add this to our search, we would add it this way. We could see our preview, and then we can say "see full results." And you can see that it constructed the query for me. Again, this is showing a user how to construct those Booleans so that they can get a better search.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Now, if you didn't want an "and," you can always change these to an "or." This is going to give you a lot more results because it's an "or." But something as simple as just changing the Boolean operator and seeing the results number change helps a user understand the importance of Boolean operators. So let's go back and see.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: We have 55,000 results, which is still a lot, but it's a lot less than if we did our main search that we started with, which was just "Java." You can see over a million results for "Java." So by using the Concept Map, I could limit the amount of noise that I was seeing for my search because I'm not just looking for "Java." I can open up the Concept Map and start to refine my query, therefore giving me a better and more refined search.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So both of these things are currently active in EDS. So if you would like to find out more about either of these two solutions that we're talking about here, please reach out to us. All right, so with that, I hope that this has conveyed to you some of the promise and some of the things that are already going on in the industry today. But-- talking to NISO here-- we need some more standards.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Mapping is not very standardized. How to implement a knowledge graph in search, in a library setting specifically, there's not a lot of things out there to help all of us do that. And so that is why I beseech you to actually look into that and to move us into that great beyond-- where Star Trek, they don't have to worry about language. They all speak the same language and they can find whatever they want.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: And that's ideally what we're all trying to find here. All right? So with that, I want to thank you all for attending, and I wish you luck and good learnings from this conference.
Segment:0 .
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Good evening and welcome to the session on The State of Discovery for NISO Plus 2022. I'm Athena Hoeppner from the University of Central Florida and I will be your moderator for the evening. We're going to have two presentations by six different presenters and then we will follow that with a question and answer and discussion session, and I think we should be having a very lively discussion because we got some great material for tonight.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: So the first session will be The User Journey to Discovery Tips for Content Providers with presenters Magaly Bascones with OpenAthens, Getaneh Alemu from Solent University and Kieran Prince from OpenAthens. And I apologize to the presenters if I mispronounced any of your names. Then we'll follow that with Trekking into the Semantic Frontier with Ashley Faith from EBSCO, Lisa Hopkins from Texas A&M University, and Daniel Eller from Oral Roberts University.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And with that, I'm going to pass it over to the presenters and then afterward, be sure to click on the link to join us in the chat for the Q&A and discussion.
MAGALY BASCONES: Good morning. I'm very glad to be here today and present with Kieran and Gataneh what we believe are the tips that will help content providers to improve the user journey to discovery. There are two main types of content providers. They one closer to the creation of the knowledge through editorial activities and the one who select content from different sources and aggregate them on a single digital space.
MAGALY BASCONES: Both types of content providers have a task of dissemination. In the digital communication space, this happens to platforms where the content is made available. This could be beautiful shelf by academic subjects or in rich databases that contain a mix of several content types that the content provider there is a for profit or not for profit organization or that they work under an open access or a subscription based model, don't change anything on the technical side of things.
MAGALY BASCONES: Digital publishing is a big enterprise where content providers are asked to provide digital services and solutions, access management, metadata supply, discovery statistics, accessibility, interoperability, integration with various technology setups and respond to customer-specific specific economic, political, and technological requirements. In addition to all that are most relevant to our presentation, content providers are requested to provide a user journey.
MAGALY BASCONES: The user journey, we all understand what it is, we all think that it's a good idea to know more about it. Content providers know that is essential. The user journey tell them a story. The story of how user interacts with the content types and how intuitive an interface is. When they start discovery as the actions that allows library and users to interact with relevant content that they don't know about, the user journey to discovery will tell content providers a broader story.
MAGALY BASCONES: We tell them where an end user, a student, a researcher, a teacher, et cetera start their journey, which path they take and what they do next. There are more and more studies about the use of journals in libraries. Here are a couple of examples, including this student journey map presented by Caroline Gould from the University of Melbourne.
MAGALY BASCONES: This studies focus on understanding how libraries are helping or attracting users from the process of discovery. One of the conclusions is that the user journeys to discovery are not an A to B experience, they're a cycle. All the scholars say communication is. We are humans, and naturally, we are adverse to frustration and time wasting. A journey full of dead ends, uncharted paths, and traffic controls will soon discourage end users, affect user engagement and content discovery.
MAGALY BASCONES: If the content is not discovered, this affect users. Obviously, content providers want their content to be discovered but it's not enough for them to put the content available in an organized manner on their platform. Discoverability requires that the platform are interconnected with the rest of the end user digital ecosystem. The three tips that we have today on how to make content more discoverable and how to contribute to an enriching and user journey to discovery.
MAGALY BASCONES: Let's start by the first ones, distribution. It's where the users are. It sounds pretty obvious but the trick is to identify where actually the users are and how you can manage to be there. Let's see. Studies and experience on Discovery journeys tell us that end-user started discovery journeys on places like Google, Google Scholar, indexing services, library and discovery services, et cetera.
MAGALY BASCONES: It has been told as well that all kinds of users may use Google but the journey to discovery doesn't stop there. We know that discovery the results as well an element of luck finding. This means that distribution of publication information is a very important task for content providers. It is important the content providers work with as many discovery starting points as possible, starting with the most general ones and the one relevant to the subject areas.
MAGALY BASCONES: But how to do this? Publication information take the form of metadata. Make your metadata open and freely available, make it available on your platform, put in place metadata exchange agreements. Even if most of this exchange will be free of charge, don't give away your content information without having an agreement with the recipient. Use this agreement to establish when, how, and in which formats the metadata will be distributed and what the recipient will do and can do with it.
MAGALY BASCONES: Make sure that your delivery is the best possible quality. Don't forget, once it is distributed, it is out of your control and correcting in publication information is nearly impossible. Communicate. Make sure that your customers know about what you're doing and why you have committed in terms of distribution. Discovery services, Google, indexing services, work with a large amount of content providers.
MAGALY BASCONES: Sued publication information will be treated as one more in a long queue of requests. As a content provider, you can guarantee to your customers that their knowledge bases and discovery services will ingest your data in a timely manner. The only thing you can confirm and guarantee to your customers is that you are distributing it at the best of your abilities. Distributing publication information is a costly task.
MAGALY BASCONES: Don't underestimate this aspect. You need time, systems in place, and especially patience. Thank you.
GATANEH ALEMU: Hello, hi. This is Gataneh Alemu from Solent University, a Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian. And today, following on from Magaly, I'm going to present on The Role of Metadata for Discovery and some tips for content providers. So as most of you know, metadata is essential for search, discovery, relevancy ranking, refinement, grouping of related resources.
GATANEH ALEMU: And everything that content providers do depend in one way or another on the metadata present. Of course, without metadata and without the bibliographic control, such as cataloging description of resources, most of information will be a chaos. So today, I'm going to just provide in this presentation some tips on what content providers need to do in relation to metadata.
GATANEH ALEMU: One of the tips is to create a user centered or a usable metadata. IFLA, one of the standards organizations, in its reference models and FERPA and LRM, identifies use what's called user tasks such as finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining, and exploring resources. So these are more user focused tasks.
GATANEH ALEMU: So the metadata that you create need to cater to these user tasks of finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining. So in finding-- so what metadata elements, attributes, and relationships could enable the users to search, find, or retrieve information resources? What are the attributes and relationships of a given work, expression, manifestation, or item, in IFLA's LRM terms, that allow users to find a resource?
GATANEH ALEMU: So any metadata decision needs to put the user in mind. This relates to metadata that helps users to find related resources. So to identify those metadata elements that are relevant to find a resource. To identify a resource, what are the elements and relationships? What are the minimal set of attributes sufficient to differentiate one resource to the other in terms of edition or title, date of publication, distribution, series, statement, et cetera?
GATANEH ALEMU: Selecting-- once identified, what are the metadata elements that help users to filter and select relevant resources, and finally obtaining the resource itself, which helps users to access and utilize the information resource. But of course, explore is the ability to allow users to navigate and discover related information resources. So in all this, metadata is key for distribution, visibility, discoverability, accessibility, service and usage.
GATANEH ALEMU: Some of the user behavior studies conducted shows that users tend to use simple search instead of, for example, advanced search, which used to be the case in old library discovery interfaces. So more and more users tend to use simple search. So we need to capture the metadata towards that kind of simple search approach.
GATANEH ALEMU: And of course, users also tend to use fewer words in their search. So the number of words, for example, as we find out in Solent University discovery interface, about nearly 40% of the users use two keywords, like "human resources," "events management," "critical thinking." This also complies with other research conducted, for example, by OCLC on how users search on Google, so two keywords.
GATANEH ALEMU: Of course, standards are key. So stick to standards, is another tip. The standards, the metadata standards, provide the metadata structure, for example, by providing metadata elements, metadata encoding rules, controlled vocabularies. And they provide granularity, the level of detail that's required in metadata. It provides the metadata provenance, which is about, what's the metadata?
GATANEH ALEMU: Where does it come from, the context, the history, the ownership. Metadata standards also provide the kind of framework for metadata quality by providing the accuracy, consistency, and ensuring whether the metadata is correct. And also, it provides a kind of simplicity. Of course, simplicity could be more about interface. But still, it's a relevant concept, it is, for standards.
GATANEH ALEMU: It ensures-- standards provide interoperability. The challenge-- but of course, also the opportunity-- is there are lots of metadata standards out there. In fact, the old adage, which says, the good thing about standards is there are too many to choose from. Depending on your business or your business model or the type of organization you are, there are various methods and standards to pick and choose.
GATANEH ALEMU: One of the standards that libraries use, because I work in library and in a library-- is RDA, Resource Description and Access standard, which provides a more richer description and support the IFLA tasks of finding, identifying, obtaining, and storing information. It also is intuitive for catalogers, of course, but also provides a more richer description and allows to differentiate one word from another.
GATANEH ALEMU: So I would say stick to RDA at the moment, because it also provides the ability to cross-link related works. Another tip is create-- ensure your metadata is quality assured. Of course, there are various facets to quality, like compatibility, completeness, up-to-dateness, consistency, usefulness, credibility, refinement, et cetera, multilinguality.
GATANEH ALEMU: All these are tied in one way or another with metadata quality. But to be more precise, ensure the values, the metadata values, as well as the metadata elements and fields are standardized and accurate, well-formed, complete, accurate, correct. So invest your resources in ensuring metadata quality, because there is no point in having inaccurate or incorrect metadata, which means no discoverability, no findability, no refinement.
GATANEH ALEMU: The other important tip, probably, is also include essential metadata elements. NISO, for example included this-- recommends some metadata elements that are essential, such as title, name, dates, book identifiers, subjects. Of course, also using clear, consistent titles, using name authorities, like standardized authorities, standardized dates, identifiers, such as ISBN, ISSN, the DOI, et cetera.
GATANEH ALEMU: Another organization, NAG, the National Acquisitions Group in the UK, also provided some essential metadata elements, which also comply, actually, with NISO's, about title information, author information, publication information, et cetera. As you can see on the right, this is a marked standard in the metadata field, and the search field is required.
GATANEH ALEMU: Some of them are essential. Some of them are desirable. Some of them are system-generated. Some of them are created by catalogers, metadata people. Also be consistent on your titles and subtitles, because I think, again, as a cataloger and metadata librarian, I found sometimes difficult, for example, to group related editions and related versions of books because of omissions of, for example, the subtitle.
GATANEH ALEMU: Or sometimes some articles, like the "a," the "a," the "an," are different from edition to edition. As you can see, for example, here, one of the titles has-- one of the editions has Communication and Interpersonal Skills for All Nurses. The other, it says Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Nursing. It might be a very minor difference. But for systems and for discovery systems, there is no way to differentiate between the two.
GATANEH ALEMU: So the system would consider these two editions of a book as different works. But in fact, in actuality, they are a different edition of the same book. So mind your articles, your conjunctions, the Oxford comma, et cetera. Another tip would be, enrich your metadata. Be specific. Be granular.
GATANEH ALEMU: Use this structure in your description. The specificity of the subjects, concrete subjects instead of general subjects, that's another tip. The more metadata or access points, the better. In fact, RDA, for example, the Resource Description and Access, omits the rule of three and says, if you have the time and the resource, add as much details, as much authors as possible, as much access points as possible in your metadata.
GATANEH ALEMU: The more metadata is better. And finally, just to conclude, these are-- let me tell you the tips I would give you as a takeaway. Create user-centered, usable, specific, consistent, accurate, and complete metadata. Stick to metadata standards, because that's what we use in libraries. That's what in many institutions, whether in academic or research libraries.
GATANEH ALEMU: Keep the metadata enriched and user-focused, user-centered. Save the time of the user. In fact, back to the Ranganathan's five laws of library science, saving the time of the user is an important criteria. Enhance discovery through metadata. And then you can maximize usage and impact. There is a known investment through metadata.
GATANEH ALEMU: And in general, enriched, linked, opened, and usable metadata of data means maximizing your usage and impact and discovery. Thank you very much for the opportunity today. And I hope if you have questions, you can ask. Thank you very much.
KIERAN PRINCE: Good afternoon, good evening, everybody. My name is Kieran. I'm a business development manager OpenAthens. Working at OpenAthens, we're aware of some of the challenges users, libraries, and publishers all face with regards to accessing digital content. So today I'll be talking about federated authentication and discovery, and hopefully identify where the challenges and opportunities lie. And there's a real theme of standards across both mine and Getaneh's presentation today.
KIERAN PRINCE: So hopefully you'll have some takeaways from that respect as well. So just a quick introduction to OpenAthens-- we're an identity and access management service that have been providing services to the research and academic community for over 25 years. We were the first federated authentication service in the world and now work with over 2,600 libraries and publishers in over 75 countries.
KIERAN PRINCE: And OpenAthens came to be all those decades ago largely in response to the change in user needs, needs that are still evolving today. So users were starting to access more material online. And over the last few decades, the concept of a digital identity has been developed. And with that, personalization is a key part of providing any online service. And as a publisher, you can build a profile of your customers, while users benefit from that tailored experience.
KIERAN PRINCE: When we talk about discovery, the impact of mobiles cannot be underplayed. Although more in-depth analysis may not take place on mobile devices, they are certainly used for research and discovery. And giving users the ability to log on from any device from any location with a single username and password is one of the reasons federated authentication has expanded globally.
KIERAN PRINCE: Mobile access provides a real challenge for some of the IP-based authentication services used today, and federated authentication is far more agnostic in these types of scenarios. It's also worth noting that demand for remote access to resources will more than likely be here to stay. We had a huge kind of explosion in demand for access to digital resources remotely, both from publishers and libraries, over the last 18 months.
KIERAN PRINCE: And we don't expect that to change. I think that the hybrid model will be used both in corporate settings, but also in education settings as well. And more universities are providing remote services across the globe. So having remote access enabled on your platform is really key. So the federated login journey-- so at OpenAthens, we're mostly concerned with federated login, and it can be simplified with this cycle here.
KIERAN PRINCE: It's easier to think about federated login as just a single sign-on. And within that, there are three main user journeys-- navigating the publisher website, navigating the library website, so going through a library portal, and accessing through discovery services, things like EBSCO and ProQuest. It's the latter where federated login can provide both a challenge and an opportunity.
KIERAN PRINCE: So we'll take a quick look at these three user journeys. And it's also worth noting Shibboleth, that this applies to Shibboleth as well, and other federated authentication methods. The thing with SAML is it's interoperable, so yeah. But the concept applies across the board. So WAYF, or Where Are You From, is a key concept within federated authentication.
KIERAN PRINCE: We understand discovery as part of the research journey, but within the federated authentication space, WAYFs are used to provide organizational discovery, so slightly different to the term "discovery" that's used in kind of research. If a user navigates to publisher website, a resource provider needs to know who they are. So a WAYF allows the user to log in, to search for their library, and log in at their home or organization.
KIERAN PRINCE: The reason they have to do this is because a key concept within SAML or OpenAthens-- so SAML more widely-- is that libraries are doing the authentication. OpenAthens, Shibboleth handles the authentication on the library side. So as a publisher, you're just doing the authorization. So we're telling you who a user is, and then you're doing the authorization. What can they access?
KIERAN PRINCE: Again, this is-- there are standards approach to WAYFs. Things like avoiding lists and having a dynamic search bar are overall recommendations that can help you improve your WAYF. Again, standards-- so standardization is key. Federated authentication is built on SAML, which is a standard protocol for authentication. So it generally doesn't matter what vendor or software the library or publisher is using as long as there is a focus on that standardization above everything else.
KIERAN PRINCE: Some things that are standardized include the language. We use things like "Access through your institution," rather than listing some types of vendors, so avoiding listing things like that. As with shibboleths, it's agnostic, so things like "Access through your institution" are much more standardized, The position of that Log in button generally in the top right-hand side of the page, and helpful error messaging.
KIERAN PRINCE: So if the user doesn't have a subscription, they hit a dead end. Having some helpful messaging rather than just having a dead end with no communication is recommended. Although SAML is a standard, again, like my colleague mentioned earlier, there are many standards to abide by. So one of our roles within the industry at OpenAthens is to try and enforce some of these standards.
KIERAN PRINCE: But again, there is a lot of variety out there. Just sticking to the recommended practices as much as you can is a really useful thing to do. When it comes to the user journeys, grouping access options is also best practice, again, for creating that standardized user journey. So users should not have to jump around the page to find where to log in. If they hit a paywall, if they do have access through their institution, that should be front and center.
KIERAN PRINCE: They shouldn't be kind of encouraged to go down that pay for this now route when there is access through your institution an option available. So at OpenAthens, we adopt the three-click rule. If a user has gone through huge amounts of effort to find an article, perhaps through a discovery service, and they want to engage with that article after reading the abstracts, it's really important to make sure it's easy for them to do that.
KIERAN PRINCE: So just an example here, you'll see, again, the abstract and the PDF are highlighted at the top. The access options are at the bottom of the page in this example. Once you go through those access options, there are, again, many more options. And then once you select your option, there is another list to pick from. So again, more than three clicks, access options are at the bottom of the page.
KIERAN PRINCE: So yeah, clearer signposting, SeamlessAccess attempts to address some of these challenges, which we'll talk about in this a bit later on. But yeah, it should be much more clearer whether the user has access and where they do have access to the content. So WAYFless and deep linking-- so where authentication and discovery services really overlap is when it comes to things like the WAYFless and deep linking.
KIERAN PRINCE: So from the three aforementioned user journeys, it's probably the most common users going through discovery services, but it's often the most frustrating for users. And that's because a lot of publishers still don't support deep linking. And what we mean by deep linking and WAYFless is kind of the article-level authentication. So the user is not going directly to your website.
KIERAN PRINCE: They're finding an article deep inside your website through a discovery service. If they don't have deep linking enabled on that platform, you can go through various user-- various login loops, where we want that user to get authenticated into that article and be able to read it without having to go through several hoops. So for an example here, I've took this full-text article from a discovery service.
KIERAN PRINCE: If a publisher doesn't support deep linking, I might just land at the home page of this particular website and have to go through another search, a search task. But when it comes to ClinicalKey in this example, they provide deep linking. So the actual result is I get direct access to that article with just a few clicks. So again, you can see how having to go through another process of searching for that article on a different platform-- you can see why that might be frustrating for users.
KIERAN PRINCE: So yeah, as fast access to that article as possible. Now, I can't speak about discovery and authentication without mentioning SeamlessAccess and GetFTR. So SeamlessAccess aims to address some of those core user experience challenges, so aims at standardizing that user login, particularly when you're navigating the publisher website. So having a consistent user journey, not having to find where the login button is, not having to find where the WAYF is or go through a list of organizations, it addresses some of those core UX challenges, which is a core challenge in the industry as a whole.
KIERAN PRINCE: While GetFTR addresses some of the challenges around accessing content through discovery services, so signposting articles that the user is able to access because they have a subscription. So again, taking away those dead ends where they've gone down a route to find an article, and they find out they don't have a subscription. So again, just industry-- these are community-led initiatives that we urge people to get involved with.
KIERAN PRINCE: I've seen-- SeamlessAccess, for example, people who have implemented it have done it to huge success. I think it does seem like a bit of a barrier to entry for certain-- that there is a barrier to entry for some of the smaller-based publishers. But again, OpenAthens is here to lower those barriers. We are integrated with SeamlessAccess. If you ever need support through that, we're here to help, because one of the challenges it doesn't address is the complexity around SAML.
KIERAN PRINCE: And that's the reason that OpenAthens exists. Both these initiatives are fully supported by NISO. And finally, just before I summarize, I just want to highlight the growth and scale of federated authentication. So the EU, for example, has been pumping money into Southeast Asia to build up network capabilities and provide federated authentication services in the region.
KIERAN PRINCE: So we've seen federations pop up in the region, all supported by SAML. So again, it's been highlighted and noted as the-- at least for the foreseeable future-- as the choice for authentication across the world. The benefit for you as a publisher is you have a global infrastructure that you can plug into. As long as you support SAML, you've got these federations all around the world with thousands of potential customers to plug into.
KIERAN PRINCE: And they all adopt by the same similar standards, and again, that's SAML. So in summary, user needs have changed. Over the last 25 years since we've been in business, they certainly have. And even over the last 18 months, they've changed even more. So being aware of user needs and their behaviors is really important.
KIERAN PRINCE: So yeah, speak to librarians and speak to users to get a feel for those users' needs and behaviors. Remote access is here to stay, and with that, more mobile accessibility is essential. When it comes to WAYFs, we recommend avoiding less. Maybe consider WAYF Finder or the SeamlessAccess WAYF. They abide by the same kind of recommended practices and, again, are much more standardized. So the UX, User Experience, is an industry-wide challenge, and standards are possibly the answer.
KIERAN PRINCE: We'll never get everybody to abide by one single standard, but we can get very close to that. Grouping access options helps with that user experience, and think about that three-click rule. Does your site support the three-click rule? If not, reach out and find some user experience experts out there. We have our own, but there are others out there in the market. Deep linking and WAYFless are essential.
KIERAN PRINCE: Although they're not mandated by a lot of providers, they are absolutely essential, as key a part as logging on the website directly through a WAYF. So yeah, they're absolutely essential. We urge you to take part in industry initiatives, particularly SeamlessAccess and GetFTR. And again, yeah, federated authentication is growing, so there's real opportunities to be found, particularly in these new markets across Southeast Asia.
KIERAN PRINCE: Thank you.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: My name is Ashleigh Faith. I am a librarian data scientist here at EBSCO, and I am also the Director of Platform Data and Visualization. All right, so thank you for joining us. Today we are going to be talking about trekking into the semantic frontier, and we're going to explain a little bit about what that actually means. So the introduction here is semantic search, something that we've been talking about for decades.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: It's surprising to say that at this point, but it's so true. And it means that you're finding whatever you want with whatever word you want, and that is without barrier. And I don't know if we're quite there yet. There are a lot of new technology pieces out there that the library community may or may not be aware of that are really going to push this forward. So the first one is the linked data standards.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So you'll see W3C, RDF, SKOS, SPARQL. All of those things are helping us really use data in a way that we've never been able to do before. The next part is a knowledge graph, which is kind of predicated on some of those same standards. But think of it more of like a crosswalk, but with a many-to-many type of relationship. This is something that a lot of different markets are using, but the library community doesn't talk about it a whole lot.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So the question here is, how can this actually help us with some of our search and subject problems that we see today? So let's dig in and find out.
LISA HOPKINS: Hi, I'm Lisa Hopkins. I am actually the Head of Technical Services at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. And I came to the library world as a cataloger, so I do have a shift at the reference desk, a couple a week. And I really approach my reference shifts from this point of view, from knowing the back end, the nuts and bolts. So when I see a student approaching the library reference desk, I know it's probably one of two kinds of students.
LISA HOPKINS: There's the student that comes in, plops down, thoroughly discouraged because they've spent the entire weekend looking for an article. They're supposed to have 10, and they can't even find one. So what I do with that student is I say, OK, what search terms are you using, and where are you using them? And I replicate their search exactly so that I, one, can see what they're doing and see what they're seeing, but also so that I can sort of transform that search in front of them.
LISA HOPKINS: Usually their search is a phrase. It's very closed and very narrow. So I back up a little bit, open it up, and show them how sort of unlocking that search will start to open up the search. And we will then follow the search paths. The second student we are all familiar with sits down with this overwhelmed look because they don't even know where to start.
LISA HOPKINS: They haven't even formed the concepts they want. And this student and I, we travel down this word adventure, because what I do is turn away from the monitor at that point, and I say, OK, why don't you just talk to me about your research? And I have a pen and a paper, and I just started jotting words down as they're describing what they're interested in, what they're researching.
LISA HOPKINS: When I have about 5 to 10 words, I then show them how we can start plugging those into the keyword search. And they start to realize that they don't have to have this polished concept. I become like a translator from where they started to where they can go. And it really unlocks their idea of what they wanted to do and opens it up.
LISA HOPKINS: And then we then start the search and travel down the paths that the searches lead us. I feel like I'm a translator, and rather than just writing down synonyms, I'm really trying to find concepts from what they're saying. I make it look so easy, and it can be for them too if they can back up and learn from the search box how they can expand their own searches.
LISA HOPKINS: One of the things that we can do is as I'm expanding that search and showing them how to step back, I'm using EBSCO's recommended searches. I'm saying, see, once you start typing this in, EBSCO is going to recommend other search terms. Use that because that's going to open up more articles for you. Librarians aren't always there, so at some point, the student needs to learn themselves.
LISA HOPKINS: It needs to be obvious how they make that gap from where they are to where we want them to be and where they want to be.
DANIEL ELLER: Hi, my name is Daniel Eller, and I am the Electronic Resource Librarian at Oral Roberts University, and I also teach information literacy classes to the behavioral sciences and some others. So one of my central concerns is when I'm looking at trekking into this new semantic frontier is knowing where we're going and also being able to explain that journey to others. I think, for librarians, transparency is paramount if we're going to be part of mapping out this journey.
DANIEL ELLER: A large part of what we do is teach information literacy. Understanding how query expansion and enhanced subject precision can help us requires that we are able to teach others how it works and how their search results and resources are generated. The king of natural language is obviously Google, and that doesn't offer much transparency when students use it. They have a mixed bag of results, and sometimes they get exactly what they want and they're happy, but they don't know why it generated it or how it generated it.
DANIEL ELLER: And that's not very helpful for librarians. In a lot of ways, Google is a black box. And we as librarians, I think we need to take care when we're teaching how this works that we ourselves don't create black boxes, that we understand the process that brought us to this. So we still love our filters so that we can explain to a student how Boolean operators impact these vocabulary, but we also don't want to always rehearse the same old thing.
DANIEL ELLER: We want the system to begin to learn from us and make these connections for us. But during that process, I think the huge thing is that we never lose the transparency, so that when we plug in a subject heading or a natural language term, and it's translated, that we can explain to the students every time why they're getting the results that they're getting, and it's not a mixed bag. So I think coming from the electronic resources, we see the filters that we have on the administrative end, on the back end.
DANIEL ELLER: But we are also aware of how we need to translate that to our reference librarians, and to our teachers, and most of all, how we need to work with the producers, like EBSCO and EDS and other producers, who are creating these algorithms, who are creating these data sets. And we need to be in constant dialogue so we know what's happening and we know how to tell our students what's happening, versus just surrendering our jobs over to another black box.
DANIEL ELLER: So I think that that's the key to this, is all working together and having these dialogues behind the scenes and being able to understand what's happening, and still have it be translated on the screen when the students are doing their searches and we're sitting down with them. So I think that that is the future, is a dialogue with us that's creating a better dialogue with the system and with the students.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So what we have heard from the wonderful folks on this call is where we are today and those frustrations that so many students have with subject search. And then we've heard from Daniel, where do we want to go? What's the desired state for semantic search, specifically for subjects in our library systems? So how can we introduce this application, this way of doing things into the library? One reason that we really want to talk about this from a standards perspective is libraries already use a lot of standards.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Like MARC records, for instance, are very standardized. In fact, if you wanted to do your own mapping of users' natural language from your specific library, you can do that. And there are specific MARC fields in order to do that. Now, I did mention in the beginning of this presentation that there are some new technologies you might want to explore. That is a knowledge graph.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So when you look at this from a user's perspective, because that's why we all are here, to help our users find information more easily, you'll see an example here, where if I type in "Maglev," that's my natural language. Maybe that's the word my professor used when they were describing the assignment to me. Well, we know that there are other words for this. There is a high-volume, natural language word that a lot of other students are using, which is "high-speed train." But we also know there are controlled vocabularies that may not actually agree with each other on what that word is.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So you'll see IEEE here uses a different word than the Library of Congress. You should not have to translate for every single database, every single publisher, and every single culture and geographic area. This is something that a knowledge graph-- if you are starting to map these together, you start with linked data, and then you map them together so that they are synonymous-- really helps in the search application.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: EBSCO has something called the Enhanced Subject Precision. This is exactly what it does. It expands the user's search into not only other natural language that mean the same thing, but also other subjects that mean the same thing. So looking at the actual technology behind the scenes, you may have heard of something called a taxonomy. That's a one-to-one mapping. And then you see a thesaurus.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: We are very familiar with that in libraries, and that adds a few more layers, and that is "see also" and "use for." Once you get into an ontology, that's where you start to include things that are more like "related to," but we're adding some substance to that, like "has a" and "part of." We get that naturally from the broader and narrower kinds of concepts that we have in our own vocabularies.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: But what we can start to do as librarians is actually sit down and think through, how are these two subjects related to one another? That's where we're not only just doing a translation between synonyms, but now we're helping a user that may not know what things are related to other things in a specific and semantic way. And that's why EBSCO has something else called the Concept Map, where you can see this in a visual representation.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So if I wanted to find out all of the adverse effects of a certain drug, I can actually look that up and see that drug and how it's related to adverse effects of taking it, or the capital city of a certain country that I am maybe doing a research paper on. All right, so let's see this in practice. So first we're going to look at how we can see query expansion in practice.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So let's say I was asked to do some research on the Battle of the Bulge. Here I can very clearly and transparently see where my query shows up. That's great. That is great confirmation for me to understand I did a good search. Now, let's look at something else, though.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: This subject right here, which is in bold, that's not exactly what I searched for. However, this is a synonym of Battle of the Bulge. So what is happening here is two things. First, I as a user am getting a better search because I'm not missing content just because I didn't use the, quote unquote, "right word." The second perk is, as a user, I have now learned that this is a synonym of Battle of the Bulge.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So now I have actually learned something, information literacy, that there are other subjects that mean the same thing, and I've learned what these two synonyms are. Now let's go to Concept Map, which is the next layer, where it is looking at how different concepts, different subjects, are related to one another. Think of it like all of these synonyms have been mapped together to form one circle, one node, in our knowledge graph and finding out how these two things have anything in common.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So here we are in the Concept Map. So let's start our search with "Java." Now, this is an interesting one because Java can actually mean a few different things. We have object oriented programming. We have a bunch of other things that mean Java. Java is an island. And here's some natural language at play. "Java" is also another word for "coffee." So you can see how the word "Java" has been mapped to a few different contexts.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Now, the reason we do this is we want to help the user understand, one, there are different contexts to some of their words that they might not realize. That will also help them in their regular EDS search. The second thing is we are helping the user understand which context they mean, so they don't get all the contexts in one search. So let's start our search here with the programming language. Now here you are seeing the visual interpretation of all those synonyms.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Those are all mapped under each of these circles on the screen. And now we can actually see how these things relate to one another. So we can see C++ is influenced. Java was influenced by the C++ programming language. Well, that's pretty cool. Now I understand not only the context of Java programming language, but I also now understand that Java had a heavy influence in C++.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: In fact, if I was a computer science student, this might actually be a great place to start my research. How is Java influenced by C++? If I wanted to do that I can add both of these to my search, and you can see that search building over here. Now, if I wanted to just get a sneak peek to make sure that I'm on the right track, I can look at the content preview. And so you can see here all of the different articles that I would get if I sent this query back to EDS.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: But let's say I want to add some more context to this. Let's say C. Since we see C++, maybe C is also something that has a connection. Yes, it is influenced by the language for C, but I don't know much about C the programming language. So let's explore that topic. Now I'm looking at the knowledge graph connected to the language for C, and I can see a lot more about that. Open programming language.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: You can see the definitions that are in each. And you can see which discipline or domain that it's from. And you can continue to do your search this way. So if we wanted to add this to our search, we would add it this way. We could see our preview, and then we can say "see full results." And you can see that it constructed the query for me. Again, this is showing a user how to construct those Booleans so that they can get a better search.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Now, if you didn't want an "and," you can always change these to an "or." This is going to give you a lot more results because it's an "or." But something as simple as just changing the Boolean operator and seeing the results number change helps a user understand the importance of Boolean operators. So let's go back and see.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: We have 55,000 results, which is still a lot, but it's a lot less than if we did our main search that we started with, which was just "Java." You can see over a million results for "Java." So by using the Concept Map, I could limit the amount of noise that I was seeing for my search because I'm not just looking for "Java." I can open up the Concept Map and start to refine my query, therefore giving me a better and more refined search.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: So both of these things are currently active in EDS. So if you would like to find out more about either of these two solutions that we're talking about here, please reach out to us. All right, so with that, I hope that this has conveyed to you some of the promise and some of the things that are already going on in the industry today. But-- talking to NISO here-- we need some more standards.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: Mapping is not very standardized. How to implement a knowledge graph in search, in a library setting specifically, there's not a lot of things out there to help all of us do that. And so that is why I beseech you to actually look into that and to move us into that great beyond-- where Star Trek, they don't have to worry about language. They all speak the same language and they can find whatever they want.
ASHLEIGH FAITH: And that's ideally what we're all trying to find here. All right? So with that, I want to thank you all for attending, and I wish you luck and good learnings from this conference.
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