dutchess: dutch electronic subject service – a dutch national collaborative effort
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Online Information ReviewDutchESS: Dutch Electronic Subject Service – a Dutch national collaborative effortMarianne Peereboom
Article information:To cite this document:Marianne Peereboom, (2000),"DutchESS: Dutch Electronic Subject Service – a Dutch national collaborative effort", OnlineInformation Review, Vol. 24 Iss 1 pp. 46 - 49Permanent link to this document:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14684520010320095
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DutchESS: DutchElectronic SubjectService ± a Dutchnational collaborativeeffort
Marianne Peereboom
In The Netherlands the Koninklijke
Bibliotheek (National Library) has from an
early stage initiated various projects and
services to provide access to Web resources.
One of them is NL-Menu[1], which serves as
an entry point to resources in the Dutch
domain. DutchESS is aimed more specifically
at the academic community. It had been set
up in 1993 as a local KB gopher-service, BC-
Gopher, named after the Basic Classification,
the classification scheme that was the basis of
its menu structure. The service was moved to
the Web in 1995 as NBW (Nederlandse
Basisclassificatie Web). DutchESS has been
the new name of the service since September
1997, when the completely restructured
version went online. DutchESS has been
developed as part of a two-year project (1996-
1998) funded by IWI (Innovatie
Wetenschappelijke Informatie), a funding
body for innovative projects in the area of
scientific information. Initially a local KB
project, from 1995 onwards Dutch academic
libraries joined, and at this moment
DutchESS is a collaborative effort of the KB
and seven academic libraries. After the end of
the project, KB decided to continue
developing and supporting DutchESS in a
structural way. Co-operation with the other
libraries was consolidated in a formal
agreement, whereby it was decided that the
KB would co-ordinate the collaborative
efforts and provide the necessary technical
support.
Organisation
Subject gateways may follow a centralised or a
distributed model. DutchESS is a
combination of both. Technically it follows
the central database model: the database and
user interface are sitting on a KB server. But
the responsibilities and workflow are based on
a distributed model: the selection of resources
and database maintenance are the shared
responsibility of the participating libraries. No
central content maintenance or editing takes
place. The KB provides a national co-
ordinator, a research scientist (who advises on
further development of the service) and
technical support. The other libraries appoint
their own local co-ordinator and a board of
editors. Policy is developed by the Co-
ordination Working Group (CWG), which
consists of the national co-ordinator, the
The author
Marianne Peereboom is a employed as a Research
Scientist and Project Co-ordinator at the Library Research
Department of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National
Library of The Netherlands). E-mail:
Keywords
Distribution data processing, Classification,
Information retrieval, Internet, Databases, Libraries
Abstract
This article gives an overview of the design and
organisation of DutchESS, a Dutch information gateway
created as a national collaborative effort of the National
Library and a number of academic libraries. The combined
centralised and distributed model of DutchESS is
discussed, as well as its selection policy, its metadata
format, classification scheme and retrieval options. Also
some options for future collaboration on an international
level are explored.
Electronic access
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
http://www.emerald-library.com
Service profiles
46
Online Information Review
Volume 24 . Number 1 . 2000 . pp. 46±48
# MCB University Press . ISSN 1468-4527
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research scientist and the local co-ordinators.
A steering committee, consisting of three
directors of the participating libraries, the
national co-ordinator and the research
scientist, which meets yearly, monitors policy
and long-term strategies.
Resources for DutchESS are selected by the
subject specialists of the participating libraries.
Local editors in every library check the
resources according to formal criteria before
they add them to the database. The DutchESS
maintenance infrastructure is Web based. The
subject specialists have access to an HTML-
form to submit resources. For the local editors
a maintenance tool is available for which the
editors have their own specific library password.
Via this password they get access to the
resources submitted by the subject specialists of
their own library, as well as to the linkchecker
results for the resources submitted by them.
The editors have direct access to the database
and can add, change and delete records.
Metadata format and classification
A very simple format is used for the
description of the resources, so no
involvement of professional cataloguers is
needed. This keeps time between selection of
a record and its appearance in the service to a
minimum, although this will of course also
depend on how fast the local editors
work.The records contain the following fields:
title, author(s), abstract (in English only),
classification code (numerical code with
English and Dutch terms), URL, ISSN (when
available) and some administrative fields like
creation and last-update dates and a code for
the library and subject specialist who
contributed the resource. A linkchecker
program periodically checks the validity of the
URLs. The output of this program is
distributed to the libraries which submitted
the resources via the maintenance tool, and
they are responsible for either updating the
description by changing the link or removing
the resource from the database. Because the
format is fairly simple, conversion or mapping
to Dublin Core in the future for purposes of
interoperability will not be hard.
Resources in DutchESS are classified
according to the Nederlandse
Basisclassificatie. This is a Dutch national
classification scheme, based on academic
disciplines, designed for use within the
Shared Cataloguing System of Pica, the
organisation that provides systems and
services for the majority of Dutch academic
and public libraries. Browsing the categories
of this classification scheme is one way of
finding resources in DutchESS. Simple and
advanced search options offer the possibility
to search by keywords either the complete
descriptions or within a specified field.
Other facilities in the DutchESS service are
an overview of new resources (which covers
additions made during the last seven days)
and a form for end users who want to suggest
resources, which will then be evaluated by
DutchESS subject specialists according to the
normal procedure.
Selection policy
The selection policy of DutchESS is based on
the work done in the DESIRE I project[2].
Following the guidelines developed in this
project, the DutchESS selection policy
consists of three parts:
(1) a scope policy;
(2) quality criteria; and
(3) a collection management policy.
These documents are available in Dutch and
English[3]. The scope policy determines
which types of resources will be included in
DutchESS. Resources that fall within the
scope are not included automatically, but are
evaluated on the basis of the quality criteria.
Finally the collection management policy
covers issues like coherence and consistency
of the collection, maintenance, deselection
procedures, etc.
The scope of DutchESS is very broad: it
aims to cover all academic disciplines and has
no geographical restrictions. This may seem a
bit ambitious and overconfident, but this
scope is further restricted by the special remit
and target audience of the participating
libraries. This means that KB concentrates on
the selection of Dutch resources, as part of its
responsibility for the national heritage, and
that the other, academic libraries concentrate
their selection on resources that are of
importance to their own user group of
students and researchers. But all libraries stay
within the framework outlined in the scope
policy and quality criteria and follow policies
developed by the Co-ordination Working
Group.
47
DutchESS: Dutch Electronic Subject Service
Marianne Peereboom
Online Information Review
Volume 24 . Number 1 . 2000 . 46±48
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Language issues
Currently gateways do not offer very
sophisticated multilingual facilities[4].
DutchESS is a bit of a hybrid service in terms
of language. The interface is fully bilingual and
available in Dutch and English. But from both
branches you find the same record, which
contains various language elements: the title in
the language(s) of the resource (which may,
theoretically be any existing language, as long
as it is expressed in a Latin script, either
originally or transliterated). The content
description is in English only, while the
classification scheme is available in Dutch and
English versions and the term is presented in
the record in both languages. The
administration fields have English captions
(e.g. `̀ creation date''). Users will have to realise
the consequences in terms of language of their
queries: when they search on title words they
may use words in any language; when they
want to search the description they need to use
English terms. This is explained in the help
pages (which, as is well-known, hardly
anybody ever reads). DutchESS does not
include a language field in the record, so users
cannot specify the language of the documents
they want to find. On the other hand, in the
near future records describing Dutch resources
will be marked as such, because they are an
important category within the DutchESS
scope policy, and we want to be able to
manipulate them as a special subset.
The future . . .
From the other contributions in this section it
will probably be clear that the various
gateways, although their approaches may
differ, encounter broadly the same problems in
relation to content issues, technology and
sustainability. Recently there has been an
increasing tendency to exploit synergies in the
field of subject gateway development.
Discussion platforms have been set up, like the
IMesh Framework, which maintains a
discussion list and organised a workshop in
Warwick (UK) in June 1999. An IMesh toolkit
is under development which will improve
interoperability and promote the use of the
same standards and solutions by gateways. In
September 1999 the DESIRE II project
organised a workshop in the National Library
of The Netherlands, `̀ Building national and
large-scale Internet Information Gateways'',
which aimed to support European national
libraries which are considering to set up their
own gateway. Tools and guidelines developed
in DESIRE II were presented and made
available to the delegates such as the
Information Gateways Handbook[5].
In the short term, DutchESS is planning to
offer interoperability with the SOSIG (Social
Sciences) and Biz/Ed (Business and
Economics) gateways. DutchESS users will
be offered the choice to include those
databases in their DutchESS query.
In January 2000 the Reynard project started,
funded by the EC's 5th Framework
Programme. In this project, managed by the
KB, 12 European partners co-operate, a
number of which maintain their own gateway
or participate in a collaborative effort, like the
UK services organised in the RDN framework,
the Special Subject Guides (SSG-FI)
maintained in GoÈttingen, the Finnish Virtual
Library Project and DutchESS. Reynard aims
to set up a European portal to subject gateways
for the academic community. In this
international context DutchESS staff are able
to offer their own expertise, based on six years
of gateway development and efforts to co-
ordinate initiatives on a national scale, and also
to learn from the experiences of others.
Although many important problems have yet
to be solved ± such as issues of scalability and
sustainability in the long term ± and the road
ahead may lead us in other directions from
those we may envisage at the moment,
DutchESS will try to keep contributing to
subject gateway and Internet information
retrieval developments, both as a Dutch
national focal point and as a player in the
international field.
Notes
1 <http://www.nl-menu.nl/>2 <http://www.desire.org/> is the home page of the
current DESIRE II project; it also gives access to theresults of DESIRE I.
3 The English versions are available at: <http://www.kb.nl/dutchess/manual/scope_eng.html><http://www.kb.nl/dutchess/manual/quality_eng.html> <http://www.kb.nl/dutchess/manual/colman_eng.html>
4 See: Marianne Peereboom, `̀ Multilingual provisionby subject gateways'', Exploit Interactive, Issue 3,October 1999. URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue3/multilingual-gateways/>
5 Available from <`̀ http://www.desire.org''>
48
DutchESS: Dutch Electronic Subject Service
Marianne Peereboom
Online Information Review
Volume 24 . Number 1 . 2000 . 46±48
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