OLE Final Report and What They Hope to Create

The OLE Final Report is out and it begins with a "research scenario" that OLE is striving to support.  In other words, the library software they are planning to develop (in the next phase which is code named the Kuali OLE Project) could make the following scenario a reality...

An economist is conducting research on the housing market financial collapse. She needs raw economic data as well as secondary data, policy documents, and a host of other materials available in print and electronic form. Her campus uses OLE, which manages all campus collections and information-resource subscriptions and is also integrated into the campus learning management system (LMS), the accounting, human resources and student systems, and other major technology systems—as well as several consortia to which the library or the campus belongs, such as OCLC and the Hathi Trust.

The researcher uses her preferred library access tool (several options are supported by OLE) to perform an initial search. She finds a variety of resources in electronic and print form, which the search tool presents to her (using metadata provided by OLE) in a faceted browser. She selects the items of particular interest and adds them to her research resource portfolio for easier referral. To her, the process appears seamless and effortless, but behind the scenes, the library access tool works with OLE to obtain full-text copies of the resources (some from campus collections; some from interlibrary loan; some from Hathi Trust; some from outside subscription providers), license them if necessary, and route them for her use. One of the resources requires a payment: OLE notifies her; she approves the payment from one of her research accounts; and OLE routes the necessary information to the institutional accounting system and the resource provider. Another requires interlibrary loan. OLE uses its institutional-collaboration services to obtain delivery information instantaneously. That information is added to her portfolio as well, flagged so she will notice the delay and the reason. In a third case, she decides that she wants print-ondemand rather than an e-resource. Again, she approves the payment from her research account, and OLE licenses the resource and routes it to her local printstation for pickup.

When the researcher goes to the library to pick up the books she added to her research portfolio, her chosen interface to the library delivers her a route-map through the stacks that allows her to find what she needs quickly. If she has a GPS-aware smart phone, the directions can route her both to the correct building and then within it, even if she has never visited this particular site before. The map also uses her original search data to highlight all the areas of the stacks from which matching books were discovered, in case she wants to browse. As she walks the stacks, she activates the library app on her smart phone (another user interface into OLE), logs herself in, and preselects the books she’s picking up so that when she returns to Circulation, her check-out process will be faster. At checkout, OLE consults the human resources and student systems and notes that these resources were circulated to a member of both the Economics and Business faculties. It also updates the database of the recommendation engines she uses—in both cases, protecting her personal privacy while mining information that will be used to provide her and her colleagues and students with better service in future.

Returning to her online research portfolio, the researcher begins reading the fulltext electronic resources, using any of a wide variety of tools (supported through OLE’s standards-based annotation interfaces) to markup the works to her needs. In the middle of her analysis, she realizes that some of the information would be useful in an undergraduate course she is teaching. Without leaving her work, she routes those resources to the campus Learning Management System with a couple of mouse-clicks and a quick cover note to explain to the students what has been added.

Moving toward a draft document, she transfers materials into a word processor. Thanks to OLE, each arrives with full bibliographic metadata attached and ready to auto-format (via tools such as Zotero) into a form suitable for the academic journal she is targeting. When she is ready to share, she stores a copy of the draft in her institutional repository (via an OLE-aware interface) and sends a link to her various academic (social) networking venues, to invite public comment.