A Review of “Renewing the Information Infrastructure of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek” by Theo van Veen

The article I selected is titled “Renewing the Information Infrastructure of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek,” or the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). The author is Theo Van Veen, who is a member of the KB’s research and development department. This department is currently evaluating its information infrastructure and remaking it in order to “improve the integration and exchange of information between internal and external services, and lowering implementation barriers for new functionality” (van Veen, 1). Van Veen’s primary goal in this evaluation is “to be able to offer services that can understand the data coming from other services and to offer data from the KB in such a way that other services can understand and use it. Interoperability is the key to his evaluation, in fact.

The article itself begins by mentioning these goals. It then looks at the current information infrastructure of the library and goes on to consider possible changes to implement. It concludes by pointing out how the staff of the KB no longer see its infrastructure, as well as that of similar organizations, as closed systems, but rather “as a part of global knowledge, with users accessing various services to obtain information.” On the whole, it is a useful article to read because the ideas and solutions it offers are not unique to the KB – the author deliberately attempts to make them relevant to other, similar organizations. In addition, Van Veen rightly stays focused on the user’s needs throughout the article, making it clear that his intention is to improve users’ access to information as well as the KB’s visibility and usefulness.

The discussion of the library’s goals is particularly interesting as it calls for both the interoperability of various services and a minimizing of “development and maintenance efforts” for the KB’s services. Van Veen points out that although the current project mainly concerns the internal infrastructure of the KB, they expect that the methods discussed in the article will “support integration with external information infrastructures, such as those of other national libraries and museums, archives, Google, etc.” This is important because the integration of several sources of information, such as the ones mentioned above, increases the influence and usefulness of each. Creating a structure that can be integrated in this way is a good idea for the KB, and also serves as an example that other large or national libraries can follow. The author has also worked on the European Library project, which integrates the national libraries of several European countries, and so is able to offer practical experience as to what this entails.

After discussing the library’s problems and current situation Van Veen briefly discusses his approach, which is basically a concern that “integration of data takes place under the user’s control.” In other words, he wants a system whose search results can be used by other services, eliminating the need to copy and paste from one program to another. If we look at the European Library project’s online catalogue we can see this in practice.

He then offers recommendations for five areas of the KB’s information infrastructure that he feels need to be addressed:

1. Search and Retrieval
2. Search Results: text, objects and semantic relations
3. Metadata
4. Resolution
5. Authentication

Basically, he points out that infrastructures need to be “more generic, more powerful and extensible…while at the same time retaining low implementation barriers.” His team then looked at a number of available standards with these needs in mind to see which would be most appropriate for the library.

Regarding Search and Retrieval he recommends indexing all metadata in a single index, and prefers central indexing versus federated searching. This is a particularly way to integrate different databases, and the European Library’s site is a good example of this.

Metadata is another aspect of the information infrastructure that he focuses on. He suggests making metadata available in standard XML formats. He also suggests using Dublin Core (at a minimum) for the organization’s metadata in order to make it available to as many services as possible. Dublin Core, he says, “will allow access by generic search and retrieval applications without these applications needing to know the organization’s specific schema for those metadata.” This is important for interoperability, and the European Library project on which he worked can once again serve as an example of this. As his focus is largely on integration of various libraries’ databases this is an important issue to raise – the technical methods of implementing the ideas he has discussed.

Van Veen concludes his article by reiterating his belief that the KB is part of “global knowledge” which must be able to accommodate various services that users have to obtain information. In order to overcome barriers to interoperability he calls for “integrating information from open, non-monolithic systems.” Basically, he hopes that “when a user finds information elsewhere, [the KB] should provide the functionality to link this information to the local services (e.g., to order a copy of that article held by the KB).” On the whole, I found the article useful because the issues it raises are relevant for any large library and are valuable for librarians to be aware of. The integrated databases that Van Veen discusses are more or less the new incarnation of the union catalogue, and knowledge of the technical makeup of such databases, and a basic understanding of the nature of their integration, can greatly improve a librarian’s ability to implement and maintain such a system at his or her library.

Source:

Van Veen, Theo. (2005, March). Renewing the Information Infrastructure of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. D-lib Magazine, 11(3). Retrieved February 25, 2006.