Shared services: support for reporting electronic resources

A range of services for reporting electronic resources

In order to assist ESR documentary establishments in the reporting and promotion of acquired electronic resources,Abes provides a range of services to meet their needs in terms of cataloguing electronic resources. These operations are divided into different areas:       

• importing metadata from electronic resources(ebooks) :  creation of records Sudoc by importing data provided by publishers.
  • definition of a minimum quality of records in relation to data providers
  • enrichment of the data provided: automation of subject indexing and identifier alignments; automated insertion of missing links
• Reporting of nationally licensed resources acquired under the ISTEX and Collex-Persée programmes: metadata are available from the Sudoc catalogue and the BACON knowledge base (for ebooks and journals).
• reuse : Metadata is reusable in accordance with theAbes policy in favour of the opening of ESR metadata and according to contracts with publishers
  • making data available in KBart format via the BACON knowledge base which contains the metadata of the collections available in the ESR institutions.
  • part of the metadata is available from the triple store scienceplus.abes.fr. This metadata is displayed at article and chapter level in a harmonised, enriched and interoperable form. 

Regular imports of metadata of electronic resources

In order to facilitate the reporting of electronic resources available in the ESR institutions, the database Sudoc is regularly enriched through imports of metadata provided by the main scientific publishers.

Thus, libraries only need to locate themselves in order to report these resources in their own discovery tools or public catalogues. Two professional applications (authentication required) are available:

• COLODUS: for the reporting of single copies
• ITEM: for the processing of bulk copies

important: the data provided by the publishers do not constitute complete bibliographic records. As a result, records already catalogued by professionals in the network's institutions Sudoc take priority over the records provided.

Quality of metadata for electronic resources

In order to facilitate access to the wealth of large bodies of scientific documentation available to the ESR community,Abes has developed a range of tools and services available to library professionals.

Because of the volume of resources to be processed, their potential instability, and the multiplicity/variability of access methods and devices, the reporting of packages of electronic resources involves complex operations that require the provision of metadata by publishers, their pooling and regular quality control.

Among the operational responses provided byAbes :

• the development and provision of a range of web services to enhance interoperability and data quality and to facilitate bulk data processing
• the launch of the curation tool Paprika.idref.fr, which is based on an Artificial Intelligence service dedicated to the quality of links between bibliographic data and authority data
• strengthening the interoperability and cross-fertilisation of the data from Sudoc and to BACON
• automation of some regular imports in collaboration with scientific publishers
• automated processing of batches of records using dedicated algorithms (operations such as deduplication, corrections and enrichments, etc.).

Namely: since 2012, within the framework of the ANR Qualinca project in partnership with the LIRMM,Abes has been exploring the field of Artificial Intelligence and its application to exploit the wealth of data and broaden the range of services in order to make the processing of ESR data more fluid

Network establishments in the service of metadata quality

In order to encourage collaborative and participatory practices,Abes initiates and coordinates various quality projects carried out by the cataloguers of the ESR cataloguing network:

• CERCLES-Sudoc
• CERCLES-BACON
• Quality projects initiated byAbes , particularly in the framework of the Bibliographic Transition programme
• Quality projects initiated by one or more establishments, for example during reinformatisation, mergers or splits