David Feighan & Pru Mitchell

Making connections

October 2013

Using education metadata to align school resources to the curriculum

• About this presentation:– Environmental scan – technology & usage– Overview of the Australian curriculum– Challenges and Opportunities– Overview of Education Services and SCIS– Response through a partnership between SCIS

and school libraries– Future: what next

Environmental Scan

• Explosion of information– The amount of digital content created in 2011

amounts to several million time that contained in all the books ever written.

– The new USA National Security Agency data centre can store up to 12 Exabytes of information. The space required to store all the books written in any language represents just 0.0033% of this storage space.Source: Riding the Waves or Caught in the Tide? Insights from the IFLA Trend Report http://trends.ifla.org/insights-document

Environmental Scan

• Use of library print collections and online collections:– 2010 Jane Burke, Discovery versus disintermediation: the new

reality driven by today's end-user http://www.vala.org.au/vala2010-proceedings/vala2010-session-1-burke

Library navigation is complicated, especially when compared to the simplicity of open Web searching… Users value the library but use search engines such as Google to find information.

– 2012 Ithaka S+R Faculty Surveys (Higher Ed Sector)http://sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/us-faculty-survey-2012

The role of internet search engines in facilitating discovery of scholarly resources has continued to increase. The perceived decline in the role of the library catalog noted in previous cycles of this survey has been arrested and even modestly reversed, driven perhaps to some degree by significant strategic shifts in library discovery tools and services.

Environmental Scan

• Use of library print collections and online collections:– School students (and teachers) tend NOT to use the library for

digital research.– Google or other online search engine (94%)– Wikipedia or other online encyclopedia (75%)– YouTube or other social media sites (52%)– Their peers (42%)– Spark Notes, Cliff Notes, or other study guides (41%)– News sites of major news organizations (25%)– Print or electronic textbooks (18%)– Online databases such as EBSCO, JSTOR, or Grolier (17%)– A research librarian at their school or public library (16%)– Printed books other than textbooks (12%)– Student-oriented search engines such as Sweet Search (10%)

Kristen Purcell et al, (2012), How Teens Do Research in the Digital Worldhttp://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Student-Research.aspx

Environmental Scan

• Use of library print collections and online collections:– School students (and teachers) tend NOT to use the library for

digital research.– A 2007 study of student research behaviour conducted by

ProQuest and John Law (ProQuest, 2007), Serials Solutions’ Vice-President of Discovery Services, found that more than 60 percent of students consider Google to be the easiest place to start research, compared to less than 20 percent who find library databases the easiest starting point.

Burke, J. (2010) Discovery versus disintermediation: the new reality driven by today's end-user, Proceedings of the 15th Biennial VALA Conference and Exhibition. http://www.vala.org.au/vala2010-proceedings/vala2010-session-1-burke

Challenges and Opportunities

• Explosion of information• Use of library print collections and online collections

– “the amount of information available online today is overwhelming to most students...60% [of teachers] agree with the assertion that today’s technologies make it harder for students to find credible sources of information [and the majority of teachers] believe that courses and content focusing on digital literacy should be incorporated into every school’s curriculum.”Source: Kristen Purcell et al, (2012), How Teens Do Research in the Digital Worldhttp://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Student-Research.aspx

– BUT in the same period many school libraries have abandoned their online non fiction content because they can “get it for free” from the local state library.

Challenges and Opportunities

• Explosion of information and…• Use of library print collections and online collections

• Traditional library catalogues are not working for users doing digital research.

• What is the impact on school libraries as they offer less online resources at the same time that demand for online is increasing? Will they be increasingly marginalized and seen as irrelevant or small niche players.

• What is the risk of libraries losing the digital rights to content because Australian State Libraries offer state wide access based on single site subscription costs and publishers are not being adequately remunerated? How do libraries deal with funding online content now that ERA has been disbanded? http://www.nla.gov.au/content/electronic-resources-australia

New Australian Curriculum

“Emphasises the importance of knowledge, skills and understandings of learning areas, general capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities as the basis for a curriculum designed to support 21st century learning.”Source: http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au

Foundation to Year 10

Learning Areas

• English• Mathematics• Science• History• Geography• Arts F-10• Health & Phys Ed F-10• Civics and Citizenship 3-

10• Economics & Business

5-10• Languages F-10• Technologies F-10• Work Studies 9-10

Cross-curriculum priorities

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures

• Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia

• Sustainability

General Capabilities

Student Diversity

• Students with disabilities

• Gifted and talented students

• Students with English as a second language or dialect

Senior Secondary

Learning Area Subjects

English English English as an Additional Language or Dialect Essential English Literature

Mathematics Essential Mathematics General Mathematics Mathematical Methods Specialist Mathematics

Science Biology Chemistry Earth and Environmental Science Geography Physics

History • Ancient History• Modern History

Curriculum module example

Challenges and Opportunities

• To what extent does traditional library metadata LSCH and SCIS support the curriculum and facilitate discovery?

• Put library catalogue metadata into the cloud to facilitate its integration with other education metadata.

• Think beyond using the library catalogue (or even discovery layer) to facilitate discovery of library resources.

• What new partnerships are required between agencies, libraries, and publishers?

Education Services Australia

• A not-for-profit, ministerial company to provide services to the Standing Council on School Education and Early Childhood (SCSEEC)

• Assists with infrastructure and content to support national initiatives such as the Australian Curriculum and National Professional Standards for Teachers

• Services: SCIS, Curriculum Press, myfuture, ScOT thesaurusedu.au domain registrar, Scootle

esa.edu.au

Resourcing the curriculum

School libraries support the implementationof curriculum in their school

School library catalogues

provide access to learning resources for the school community

Schools Catalogue Information Service

• Quality: standards-based & consistent

• Scope: Australian/NZ K-12 education

• Terminology: subject headings appropriate K-12

• Classification: relevant to schools

• Efficiency: savings on cost and effort

• Quick: Bulk download by ISBN

1.6 million+ catalogue records

10,000+ e-books10,000+ educational websites 3,000+ learning objects 2,500+ digital video files 1,000+ audio books 100+ apps

What does SCIS provide?

1 July 2013 statistics

Form of resources catalogued by SCIS 2012-13

Learning objects

ndlrn.edu.au

Scootle

www.scootle.edu.au

Controlled vocabularies"High levels of precision and recall, the two ways in which we judge any

information retrieval system, are dependent on controlled vocabularies

and national and international standards - they cannot be obtained by

other systems not involving human intervention”

Michael Gorman foreword to Conversations with Catalogers in the 21st Century

Libraries Unlimited, 2011 (p. viii)

How do vocabularies help search• Faceted search• Curriculum Connect (ScOT)• Navigation• Collections• Redirects• Did you mean?

scot.curriculum.edu.au/search.asp

Responding to the challenges and maximising the opportunities:

a school library catalogue vocabulary renovation

metadata cleansingmetadata enhancing

we did both to create…

the glue that facilitates discovery of library collections to the curriculum

Step 1: metadata cleansing

SCIS subject headings

Step 2: metadata enhancing

ScOT thesaurus

http://scot.curriculum.edu.au/

The processWhat we found• 37,009 out of 43,130 (86%) records had ISBN-like data available

• qualifiers in ISBN field are annoying, eg ;(hbk.) ;(pbk.) ; (trade) etc

• clean up of export before matching against SCIS database, egsome ISBN duplicates can be removed by tools, watch out for field data types, esp for ISBNs and BIBIDs, leading zeros

• how to be sure that 001 values were SCIS numbers

• reloading and overlay process

• time and server load

New vocabularies and new MARC tags

Use of 658 Curriculum Element field

TOTAL number of records with this field in WorldCat:4,679 out of a total of 302,928,939 MARC records as

of 1 Jul 2013Overall number of Holdings: 63,847

Australian Cross curriculum priorities

• 282 x MARC records with “658 $bAsia and Australia’s engagement with Asia. $2ACARA Australian education vocabularies”

• 482 x MARC records with “658 $bAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. $2ACARA Australian education” vocabularies”

• 324 x MARC records with “658 $bSustainability. $2ACARA Australian education vocabularies”

Using new vocabularies• Improves catalogue metadata to facilitate discovery and

make the catalogue easier to use.• Adds curriculum metadata so the catalogue can be

aligned to the curriculum and therefore user needs.• Provides a potential seamless metadata link:

– To external authoritative information sources.– From other interfaces such as Scootle back to a library’s

own online and print holdings.

Using new vocabularies

• The glue that links the links the print and online collections to the curriculum as well as…

• The metadata that can be used to facilitate discovery of online resources directly from collection signage.

Using new vocabularies and fields

Does your library system:

• Display the field for data entry?• Display the field in OPAC?• Index the field?• Include the field in reports?• Provide export/import profiles?

Hider, P 2012 Information resource description: creating and managing metadata, Facet Publishing, London

Future of metadata

•Professional, manual creation

•User contribution

•Automation

Hybrid

Next step: community metadata

SCIS ingesting curriculum metadata from community member/s

to share out to others in the SCIS community

Future of vocabularies

Semantic webautomagical realtime updating

What does a vocabulary require?

• Unique ID for concepts to aid updating of multiple systems, and to aid translation into multilingual thesaurus• References • URI for semantic web • Web publishing tools

• SCIS professional learning programwww.esa.edu.au/scis/professional_learning.html

• SCIS updates@schoolscatinfo facebook.com/schoolscatinfo

Keeping in touch