LITA Forum 2004

Mariella Di GiacomoFrances Knudson

Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library

LA-UR-04-0170

MyLibrary @LANL, a Personalized and Collaborative Digital Library Portal for Facilitating Scientific

Research

LITA Forum 2004

Outline

Web-Based Digital Library Portals

Project, Application and Architecture Requirements

Realization/Architecture

Features of the system

Short Term Directions

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MyLibrary @LANL

MyLibrary at Los Alamos National Laboratory (@LANL) is the result of a project sponsored

by LANL Research Library.

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Web-Based Digital Library Portals

Digital Resources Information Overload Mutations in the nature of scientific

research and web technologies Personalization and Customization

services offer the potential to improve the user experience when interacting with digital resources

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MyLibrary @LANL: Goals

Web-based Application New Tool for the management of all

information resources Personalized and Cooperative service to

facilitate scientific research and collaboration Possibility to include external Internet

resources

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MyLibrary Application Requirements

Easy-to-use interface

Integration of library resources, services and external links

Personalized and Cooperative application

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MyLibrary Application Solutions

Web-based Interface with central login

Personalized private web environments for digital library users

Direct Collaboration through shared web environments

Indirect Collaboration via recommendation systems

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MyLibrary Architecture Requirements

Storage for all stored links and data

A system that has as little service disruption as possible

A robust, fast, flexible, scalable and secure system

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Scalable, robust, fast and flexible.Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) have been used to mitigate data failure and provide storage capacity.Redundant components and MySQL have been used to provide system, application and data redundancy Secure environment.A secure Linux system in conjunction with other security modules have given us a trusted environment for the application

MyLibrary Architecture Solution

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MyLibrary Hardware Architecture

The whole hardware architecture consists of: 1 Dell processing node running Linux.

2 Processors.

4 GB of main memory.

35 GB of disk storage

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MyLibrary Software Architecture

Linux Operating System

MySQL ServerPerl

Apache MySQL

Connector

MyLibrary

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Clients

MyLibrary

Application

MySQL Server

Storage Storage

RecommenderDB

MyLibraryDB

UsersDB

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MyLibrary Features

Personalized private and shared web environments to digital library users

Active Recommendation for MyLibrary content

Content upload

Web link checking mechanism

Locally stored databases alerts

Access to patron circulation record

Drag-drop interface

system provides :

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MyLibrary Organization

A Topic relates to a Discipline, such as Astronomy, Bioinformatics, Chemistry, Computer Science,

Engineering, Physics, etc.

A Topic can be interpreted as a person’s or group’s role, view or digital library channel

A Topic organizes information in Folders

A Folder collects Links and sub-Folders

organizes information into Topics :

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MyLibrary Organization

User

Topic

Folder

Url

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MyLibrary Organization

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Personalized Environments

One or more Topics with Links in the selected subject matter divided into Folders according to media types that could be selected (e.g. Databases, Electronic Journals, General Reference, Web Resources, Alerts or Personal Web Links)

A Personalized Environment presents:

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Personalized Environments

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Users

User Preferences

Topic

Folder

Topic

Url

Authorization

Discipline

Collaboration

MediaType

Properties Url-ISSN

Recommender System

MyLibrary Framework

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A Framework for Collaboration

Digital Libraries should support work and collaboration both within and between groups.

Collaborations can be synchronous or asynchronous, and they may involve people who are in the same location or in multiple locations

It is possible to distinguish Direct from Indirect Collaborations

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Direct and Indirect Collaboration

Direct Collaboration: a group of people agrees to work together, synchronously or asynchronously, in the same location or from multiple locations

Indirect Collaboration: the work and the content stored by a user or a group of users is used to

provide recommendations in the future within the user community

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MyLibray Framework for Collaboration

We have included some capabilities to support collaboration in libraries and knowledge management

Information environment where groups may keep retrieved documents

Capabilities to find other groups or people based on shared interests through a recommendation system

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MyLibrary Direct Collaboration

Direct Collaboration: environments where several users agree to work together as a defined team or group exploring and making use of digital library resources

This may be a laboratory group conducting research, or a team of students learning collaboratively for a class group project

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Shared Environments

Information spaces, Shared Topics, in which groups may store retrieved documents

Mechanism to allow different degrees of sharing for the content of group information (read-only,

read/modify and all rights)

Capabilities to find other groups or people based on shared interests as indicated by overlapping content in information spaces

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Shared Environments

A shared environment/topic follows the same structure of a private topic

A user sharing a topic with a group of people defines the members and their rights

Participants have read only or read/modify rights

The shared topic’s owner has read/modify/delete rights

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Creating a Shared Environment

In order to add people to a shared topic the owner needs to know their email addresses

A person who wants to be added to a shared topic must have a login

A message is sent to a person when added to a shared topic or when his/her rights change

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Adding a Shared Topic

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MyLibrary Shared Topics

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MyLibrary Shared Topic Members

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MyLibrary Users and Shared Topics

MyLibrary Shared TopicMyLibrary User A

MyLibrary User B

MyLibrary User C

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Cloning Private and Shared Topics

This feature allows users to copy a topic in its entirety. The application prompts you to chose among your existing topics and requires a name to be given to the copy

It is possible to make these copies private or shared

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Cloning Topics

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Cloning Folders

This feature allows users to copy a folder in its entirety. The user selects a folder from the list of existing folders, renames it, and specifies the destination topic.

It is possible to make these copies private or shared

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Cloning Folders

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Direct and Indirect Collaboration

Direct Collaboration: a group of people agrees to work together, synchronously or asynchronously, in the

same location or from multiple locations.While the implementation of shared topics met the

primary user requirement for shared documents and links, it did not address the problem of improving the digital library environment via learning and adapting mechanisms

Indirect Collaboration: the work and the content stored by a user or a group of users is used to provide recommendation in the future within the user community

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Indirect Collaboration

Indirect Collaboration: the work of one user that may benefit anonymously from other users in the future

Information stored by current users are captured and evaluated in order to guide future users with

recommendations (via recommendation systems) that is a form of anonymous, asynchronous, indirect collaboration within the user community.

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Recommendation Systems

Recommendation feature compares the content and activities of individuals and various groups and

suggests new material and new interactions

The objective of recommendation systems is to supply the user with relevant choices for content that are automatically inferred

In the case of MyLibrary @LANL the inference necessary to recommend new materials is done with the information extracted from the collection of links associated with a user

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Recommendation System in MyLibrary

The recommendation system has access to the content stored in the MyLibrary @LANL database, both private and shared

It can make comparisons between users in several ways

It can, when requested by users, notify them that others are working with similar materials

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Recommendation System in MyLibrary

The data extracted and fed to the recommendation system can be viewed as a set of three-dimensional vector links, where one dimension is a user, the second is the topic, and the third component is the link itself

User

TopicLink

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Recommendation System in MyLibrary

International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSNs) have been chosen as a means of selection because our system could generate more metadata for a specific link if an ISSN is associated with it

All the links stored in MyLibrary database are processed and those for which it is possible to extract an ISSN are evaluated

ISSN Link

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Users

User Preferences

Topic

Folder

Topic

Url

Authorization

Discipline

Collaboration

MediaType

Properties Url-ISSN

Recommender System

MyLibrary Framework

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MyLibrary and Recommendation Analysis

Four types of analysis or relationships have been extracted trough MyLibrary and the Active Recommendation Project (ARP) System:

ISSN Topic Proximity (ITP)

ISSN Semi-metric Relation

Topic ISSN Proximity (TIP)

User ISSN Proximity (UIP)

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ISSN Topic Proximity (ITP)

The data can be seen as a collection of binary relations between two sets

In this scenario the two sets are the Topic and the ISSN set

The ITP measure is the probability of co-occurrence of pairs of ISSNs in a user’s topic

The probability of co-occurrence of a pair of ISSNs, called also the proximity between two ISSNs, Y and Z, is the probability that both Y and Z co-occur in the same topic

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ITP: Direct Co-Occurrence

Two ISSNs are near if they tend to co-occur in many topics

The co-occurrence probability for each pair of ISSNs is the value used to generate e-journal

recommendation

This type of analysis can be thought as “Users who retrieved your electronic journals also retrieved these”

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T1 T2

User A MyLibrary Collection

User B

User C

ISSN10

ISSN12

ISSN17

…………

T1 T2

ISSN10

ISSN17

ISSN15

ISSN20

T1 T2

…………

ISSN10

ISSN17

ISSN205

…………

ISSN10

ISSN12

ISSN17

………..

ISSN13

ISSN15

ISSN18

ISSN20

………..

ISSN205

ISSN1908

ISSN10029

………..

.……….

……….

TO

PIC

ISSN

ISSN15

ISSN20

ISSN205

ISSN12

ISSN205

ISSN12

ISSN15

ISSN20

…………

…………

Recommendation User C /T 1

Recommendation User B /T 2

Recommendation User A /T 1

Recommender System

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MyLibrary ISSN Topic Proximity

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ITP Semi-metric

This relationship is a measure of potential association between ISSN pairs that do not tend to co-occur, but which are indirectly highly associated via indirect ISSN

This type of analysis can be thought as “We think you may also be interested in these”

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T1 T2

User A MyLibrary Collection

User B

User C

ISSN12

T1 T2

ISSN12

ISSN17

ISSN15

ISSN10

T1 T2

…………

ISSN10

ISSN17

ISSN15

…………

ISSN10

ISSN12

ISSN17

ISSN19

ISSN13

ISSN15

ISSN18

ISSN20

………..

ISSN205

ISSN1908

ISSN10029

………..

.……….

……….

TO

PIC

ISSN

ISSN13

ISSN18

…………

…………

…………

…………

Recommendation User C /T 1

Recommendation User B /T 2

Recommendation User A /T 1

Recommender System

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Topic ISSN Proximity (TIP)

This type of proximity analysis is useful to establish two-way closeness between topics or elements of a set

Two Topics are near if ISSNs they contain are near

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T1 T2

User A MyLibrary Collection

User B

User C

ISSN10

ISSN17

ISSN19

T1

ISSN10 ISSN20

ISSN17 ARTICLE1

ISSN15 …….

ISSN19

T1 T2

…………

ISSN10

ISSN17

ISSN19

…………

ISSN10

ISSN12

ISSN17

ISSN19

ISSN13

ISSN15

ISSN18

ISSN20

………..

ISSN205

ISSN1908

ISSN10029

………..

.……….

……….

TO

PIC

ISSN…………

…………

…………

Recommendation User C /T 1

Recommendation User B /T 1

Recommendation User A /T 1

Recommender System…………

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User ISSN Proximity (UIP)

This type of proximity analysis is between Users and ISSNs

The relationship contains absolute occurrence values specific ISSNs in the set of topics of a specific user

The proximity between user A and ISSN Y is the number of times ISSN Y occurs in user A compared to the entire set

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User A MyLibrary Collection

User B

User C

ISSN10

ISSN17

ISSN19

ISSN10 ISSN20

ISSN17 ARTICLE1

ISSN15 ARTICLE2

ISSN19 ……….

ISSN10

ISSN17

ISSN19

…………

ISSN10

ISSN12

ISSN17

ISSN19

ISSN13

ISSN15

ISSN18

ISSN20

………..

ISSN205

ISSN1908

ISSN10029

………..

.……….

……….

US

ER

ISSN…………

…………

…………

Recommendation User C

Recommendation User B

Recommendation User A

Recommender System…………

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Other MyLibrary Features

system provides :

Personalized private and shared web environment to digital library users

Active Recommendation for MyLibrary content

Content upload

Web link checking mechanism

Locally stored databases alerts

Access to patron circulation record

Drag-drop interface

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Drag-Drop Interface

Using the Flash plug-in, users can have a GUI type interface that allows them to drag and drop between folders and inside them

MyLibrary @LANL system through standard URLs communicates to each Flash plug-in used by

MyLibrary users

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Drag-Drop Interface

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Short Term Directions

Export/Import User Profile Unified User Database for the Research Library

services

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Resources

More information can be found at:

http://lib-www.lanl.gov/lww/add.htm

http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~rocha/talks/mylib/

LANL Research Library Web site:

http://lib-www.lanl.gov

MyLibrary @LANL Demo Access

http://mylibdemo.lanl.gov

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Questions ?

Thanks