Background
what makes a good use case?
- which of them is really linked data enabled, vs. what you could do with MARC if put in a big database
- but it may also be valid to show what can be done with linked data, even if it could be done without
- examples tying library data together with faculty profile information, archival information, and other sources not described in MARC
- and working across institutions
- enables a target audience to "get it" – LD experts, librarians, university administrators, scholars, the mainstream media
what intersections of our data sources will be strong enough to support compelling use cases?
- we have good bibliographic data
- we have usage data
- we have information about our faculty (their publications, but also potentially grants, research groups, patents, facilities they use, other research resources, datasets they have produced)
- some amount of organizational and classification data – what's shown up on the reading list for a course, or been included in reference consultations, or has been identified as a classic text in a research guide
- BUT there are companies trying to sell us information they have indexed, gleaned, and sometimes disambiguated
Related Work
- See the BIBFRAME Use Cases: http://bibframe.org/documentation/bibframe-usecases/
Use Cases (suggestions, in draft form)
| (title) | As a... | I want to... | In order to ... (Benefit) | Comment | Importance (1-5 5=highest) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Research guided by community usage | As a researcher exploring a new field, or as a reference librarian | I want to find what is being used (read, annotated, bought by libraries, etc.) by the scholarly communities not only at my institution but at others, and especially to find sources used elsewhere but not by my community | I'll be satisfied when the result of a search for a subject or for a particular work makes suggestions for further exploration that are both relevant and surprising | Demonstrates scholarly communities learning from one another across institutions This divides up by subject; others are possible | 5 dw
|
| 2 | Compose a syllabus | As a faculty member preparing the readings for a new course (or refreshing an existing course) | I want to see what works are being used by colleagues in different institutions, by searching for a course subject, or by suggestions based upon a work that I know about. I would like to be able to browse to the other works being used in a particular course, and also to see the works that are on the periphery of the standard works within a subject. | I'll be satisfied when a tool enables me to do this. | raises the question of alignment of subject terms - library resources use LCSH but (often in unique combination) but few other resources do. OCLC Fast may help. jcr Also, lib materials often have multiple subject headings. Could do textual analysis perhaps. There's work to do here. It may be considered arbitrary. | |
| 3 | Build a virtual collection | As a faculty member or librarian | I want to create a virtual collection using online materials in multiple collections across multiple universities. I need a tool that will let me browse fluid, discovering items that otherwise would have escaped my attention, and easily creating an online exhibition. Information about user interaction with this exhibition – unique visitors, but also which items they click on, in what order, how long they spend with each – should be fed back into the universities' systems to help inform future people browsing the collections. | Heavily focused on the UI. How central should that be to the use cases. How much should people be able to say about the collection itself and not just its items. Or info about the items but specific to the collection. | ||
| 4 | Follow up on a colleague | As a researcher | I want to identify colleagues at my school who have taught at or were graduated from a partner school, and see what work they have done on the topic they pursued at my school after they left my school. | Why would I want this? dw seems far afield. Out of scope. | DELETE | |
| 5 | Info-rich maps | As a student | I want to browse a geographic map and see annotations automatically added that show me relevant information (library items, archival items). I want to know that new information has been added in close to real time. | I will be satisfied when that works | Maps are a gnarly type. And how do we get the geolocated items? And this isn't very fresh. Is there a way to show relations among the pins? Or something? - dw May be possible to do autotagging by place names but may not be reliable, and are we tagging author origin, publisher, aboutness? jcr Perhaps restrict their viewing to a geo location. We'd need a gazetteer. Nasty data Not linked data base | low tier |
| 6 | Highlight my faculty's work | As a university dean | I want to works created by my faculty to be highlighted in the OPAC. This includes works by any author who has ever worked at my college. | I will be satisfied when that information is accessible by the OPAC, although it'd be nice if the OPAC actually used that information. | requires a commitment to maintain information on departed faculty in other systems of record, or taking on that task in the library. jcr we'd be ok with just current data good one integrates person data, so good
| very good |
| 7 | Find an expert | As a media person looking for a local expert | I would like to see which subject areas the faculty of a university are focused on, by seeing the subjects on which they are publishing and teaching. | subject terms used by the media are notoriously different from those used by academics, so requires interpretation and/or mapping, as well as having generalization/granularity issues. jcr faculty profiling info - too close to what VIVO et al do. Maybe looking for a topic, come up with results, and find people. If you a topic, can you suggest a reference librarian. | low priority LD enough? | |
| 8 | Assess strength by subject | As a librarian | I would like to assess the strength of my university library's collection by seeing for every LC subject class how many resources we have, how heavily they're utilized, and how much research is being done by our faculty in those areas. This could highlight potential areas of the collection to enhance or winnow. | I will be satisfied when I have an analytics tool that lets me make such inquiries. | note comment above that non-library resources are rarely if ever tagged with LC terms. jcr cross ref. to #29-31
| LD enough? |
| 9 | Identify who an author influenced | As a researcher working on a particular academic figure | I would like to be to see the works written by the students of a particular figure. E.g., what have the people who were advised by Buckminster Fuller written? Then I'd like to see the citations for those students' works clustered by subject area. | great genealogies in math and CS. But would have to link their identities to the ones that we have. | ||
| 10 | Assess influence by community usage | As a researcher working on a particular academic figure | When I search on Buckminster Fuller, I would like results ranked not by relevance but by "community relevance," i.e., by how often those works are used by my university's communities. | I will be satisfied with Stacklife | Doesn't demonstrate linked data, and similar to a couple of others - dw Population across the three institutions is big enough. | |
| 11 | Build lists and make that metadata reusable | As a teacher and as a librarian | I would like to easily create a "shelf" (a list, really) of supplemental readings for my students, and have the relationship among those items – namely, that they all have some reference to the main sources – be fed back into the Library's data set so that others can benefit from my intellectual work of clustering them. I would like the provenance of that clustering maintained. This information could then be presented through a browsable discovery system. WHAT RELATIONSHIP? | You'd have to log in. (Shelf.io does that) A top priority for Stanford and something they want to get out of this grant Privileged or not privileged? My personal list or public? Great area to explore A third party app might do this, with the three systems incorporating
| See #3 & #24 | |
| 12 | Find associated works more relevant than Amazon does | As a researcher | I would like an alternative to Amazon's "people who read this also read that." The alternative should be focused on finding results relevant to me as a researcher, rather than works a vendor is trying to sell me. In fact, I would like to see side by side lists of Amazon's clusters and my Library's clusters so I can see just how much the Library's kicks Amazon's skinny butt. | 5 dw | ||
| 13 | Create lists and learn from others' in my class | As a student in a MOOC | I would like a tool that lets me create a "shelf" of works as I do my research. I'd like to be able to see other student's shelves for a particular assignment, and I'd like to see an aggregated shelf that shows me the most shelved works. I'd like clicking on the items in these shelves to reveal other student shelves on which they appear. I'd also like to be able to see each work in a shelf other books related by subject, | Could be SQL - dw | ||
| 14 | Be notified when new archival components are uncovered | As a researcher and teacher | I would like to be notified when there are archival items that might bear on a topic I'm researching or teaching. I would like this to work at the component level, not only at the "box" level. | This would require devolving metadata from the box to the component level; Harvard has done work on this and has a set of EAD components - dw | ||
| 15 | Authority control | As a librarian | I would like to enter any form of an author's name and have authority control | (I don't understand this - dw) As it stands this use case doesn't seem to leverage our work. If the method by which one decided which "John Smith" you wanted used other information about the person, their works, their geography, etc. then it would seem to fit. Still seems a somewhat standalone tool though – sw | ||
| 16 | Be guided in collection building by usage | As a librarian | I would like help building my collection by seeing what is being used by students and faculty, and what's being used at other universities | |||
| 17 | Use NLP to explore the Library Graph | As a researcher or student | I would like to be able to ask questions about the relationships among library data using something like natural language (although I'd be happy to accept some common sense restrictions) and get back interesting results. For example, "What books were written by Cornell biologists on topics that Harvard and Stanford biologists rarely write books about?" "What books are available about communication technology that don't use 'Communication' in their title or subtitle?" "Create a timeline of science books that charts them by how many of those books have illustrations." "Find all the anthologies that have chapters by both Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman." "Create a table that shows how many genetics books were published in England per year versus how many were published in the United States." "Find me books about Christian Fundamentalism read (or assigned) in Divinity schools in the 1990s but less so after 2000." "Show me chronologically the usage in medical schools of books under the headings of both vaccination and autism." "Map by publisher location the clustering of books about American slavery since 1640." (Library Graph) | I will be satisfied when there is at least a limited vocabulary and syntax that I can master and get back interesting results. | (We could limit the NLP issue by creating a pick list of operations, relations, and outcomes. Or maybe there's an Open Source NLP library we could use. I dunno. - dw) | 5 dw |
| 18 | Expand on Cornell's Curated List of Library Resources (CuLLR) | As a researcher or librarian | I would like to be able to tag and group resources of a specific type, matching some of the affordances of a physical library in the virtual world. Examples include:
| Allow students and researchers to easily discover selected types of highly used/useful materials | 5 (dbk) | |
| 19 | Acquire related works | As a librarian working on acquisitions | I would like to find additional materials that build on our current holdings – additional works by the same authors or about the same topics. | I will be satisfied when I have a tool that lets me explore these ways | ||
| 21 | Intelligent term expansion | As a researcher or student | I would like intelligent term expansion:
| |||
| 22 | Find unexpected resources through OPAC searches | As a researcher | I would like a panel in the OPAC that shows more information about a given <author,subject> when I do a typed search. | So that I can find related resources that fall outside the scope of my search. | ||
| 23 | Pivot on works to explore more contexts | As a researcher | I would like a browse interface in the OPAC that is more intuitive, more flexible and allows for easy pivots than current (legacy) browse interactions for author, title, subject, shelf location | So that I can get a sense of related works across multiple different dimensions. | ||
| 24 | Tag items in cross-silo ways | As a librarian | I would like to be able to 'tag' items in the OPAC into curated lists, to feed subject guides, course reserves, or reference collections; I'd like these lists to be portable (into Drupal, into LibGuides, into Spotlight! or Omeka, into Sakai, e.g.) and durable; I'd like these lists to selectively feed back into the OPAC without having to modify a MARC record. | So that I can create durable, portable lists of curated resources for many uses, without having to do cataloging. | aka LD-powered CuLLR for SearchWorks | 5 (dbk) |
| 25 | Hummable work-based discovery | As a researcher or librarian | I'd like to do work-based discovery rather than item-based discovery for musical resources. | because I heard that FRBR would be really useful. </snark> | ||
| 26 | See usage faceted by funder | As a bibliographer | I'd like to be able to search all books acquired by a certain fund, and see which fund paid for the acquisition of any given book, and crosswalk that to how many times each book circulated / was used in course reserves / was on a syllabi or reading list / was authored by an institutional faculty member | So that I can do queries to support collection development and management. | ||
| 27 | Authorized names via auto-suggest | As a cataloger | I'd like an auto-suggest for fields when doing cataloging that gave me authorized forms of <names, places, subjects, corporate bodies> for data entry | So data entry is quick, less error-prone, and authority controlled from the get go. | ||
| 28 | Form-fill for faculty deposits to an IR | As a faculty depositor to an IR | I'd like an auto-suggest for fields when doing data deposit that (first) autopopulated my bio-demo data based on a unique ID (ORCID?), and (second) gave me useful, authorized forms of names, places, subjects, keywords, departments, etc. for data entry. | So data entry is quick, less error-prone, and authority controlled from the get go. | ||
| 29 | Increase the sophistication of query and display | As a researcher | I'd like to be able to visualize, pivot, do inferencing, and complex, ad hoc queries across the aggregated store of person, bibliographic, usage and curation data from three institutions | So I can uncover relationships and knowledge that were otherwise hidden. Maybe do this more as a specific narrative? | SPARQL-based OPAC + directory + circ reporting? Important | |
| 30 | Find which works by an author are used in courses | As a faculty member | I'd like to query the OPAC and/or Syllabus / Reading List portal to see which of works of a given author were used in courses | So I can gauge the impact and trends in pedagogy | ||
| 31 | Compare course usage to holdings | As a bibliographer | I'd like to be able to query which library resources were used in courses (as noted by syllabi, reading lists or course reserves) and compare that to a collection's holdings. (This may be at my or another institution) | So I can see if the relative strengths of collections to support teaching | more specific case of #8 combine with 8. drop 8 | |
| 32 | Finding Aids across institutions | As a researcher | I'd like to be able to search across archival holdings at different institutions, and follow the links from the records of one person or org to those of a collaborator held at an another institution. | So I can find relevant archival resources regardless of which institution holds them. | ||
| 33 | Integrated search of Finding Aids for archival materials | As a researcher | I'd like to be able find an emeritus faculty member's publications, teaching materials, reading lists, grant products, advisors, and archival materials in a single search. | So I can trace relevant research and teaching activities. | What else do we have that is EAD-related? | |
| 34 | Finding works related to course instructor | As a student | I'd like to be able to find all the works authored by, composed by, created by, or performed by any faculty member who has ever taught the Jazz Piano/B&W Photography/Colonial Women's History course that I'm currently taking | So that I can better understand the nature of the course and various approaches to it | ||
| 35 | Finding selected or highlighted works | As a researcher | I would like to find works in a particular subject area (e.g., Civil War photographs) that have been individually selected and curated as part of a public exhibit by a museum, library, or archive | So I can find works that are likely to particularly exemplify some aspect of the subject area | ||
| 37 | Tracing archival relationships | As a researcher | Specifying an individual in an archival collection, I would like to identify all the individuals with whom they have corresponded and find out where, in turn, those individuals have archival collections | So that I can trace the potential impact an individual has on the people with whom he/she interacts | ||
| 38 | Identifying related works | As a researcher | I would like to find all the costume photographs and illustrations for the plays of George Bernard Shaw | So I can see how the characters have been interpreted and visually represented across time |
|
|
| 39 | Identifying publications related to equipment or facilities | As a facility or lab director | I would like to find publications describing research that made use of my equipment or facilities | So that I can justify existing funding or advocate for additional resources | ||
| 40 | Identifying publications related to datasets involving research resources | As a researcher | Lacking a direct dataset citation, I would like to find candidate publications that may have used a particular dataset that involved certain resources or equipment | So that I can track the propagation of errors related to equipment calibration or otherwise determine the impact of particular questionable resources |
