Records to Go: Building the Humbul Humanities Hub

The Humbul Humanities Hub is a service of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), receiving funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The RDN comprises a number of hubs each of which offers a range of services to a broad subject-based community within the UK. A number of the hubs have evolved from centrally-funded subject gateways (e.g. SOSIG) whilst at least two of the hubs, including Humbul, are building their services from the foundations upwards.

Humbul has a comparatively long history, commencing life in the mid-1980s as a bulletin board for humanities scholars interested in information technology based within the University of Bath's Office for Humanities Communication. Since 1991 it has been based at and supported by Oxford University. Humbul evolved into a gateway to Web resources in 1994 and from static Web pages to a database in 1997 (Stephens, 1997). Humbul became part of the RDN in August 1999 and has three years' funding to develop both the service itself and also a business plan for financial viability beyond the period of central funding. Developing the Humanities Hub more than five years into the existence of the Web, four years after the launch of comparable UK subject gateways, surrounded by multi-million pound portals, is proving to be something of a challenge.

The poster session will outline two sides of developing the Hub: the vision and the diary.

The vision

The Humbul Humanities Hub seeks to combine structured metadata with the scholarly review process. The first milestone for the Hub to reach is the construction of a database which holds rich descriptions of Web resources relating to the study of selected humanities disciplines (English, history, archaeology, classics, European literature and language, religion, philosophy). Each record consists of fields following qualified Dublin Core metadata which enables us to record information about both the Web site and its intellectual content including location, creator, language, coverage (both temporal and spatial), date created and modified, and relationship to other resources. The qualifiers to the Dublin Core elements follow those proposed by the Dublin Core working groups. Each record itself has a set of metadata describing such things as the creator of the record, date created and edited, and rights associated with it.

It is essential for Humbul to build up a critical mass of data in the shortest time possible whilst remaining true to its claim to describe only sites which comply with the Hub's published selection criteria (in summary, resources fit for higher education teaching and research). Populating a subject gateway requires substantially more human effort than populating a Web search engine (which requires substantial computing effort). However, the key lies in finding a balance that can be struck between automation and manual work to ensure that labour is distributed in an appropriate fashion.

The process of getting data into the Hub should work something like this: an automated harvester gathers basic metadata from web sites linked from 'trusted' subject gateways (which in another context were referred to as 'amateur gateways' - see Fraser, 1999). Basic metadata includes title, URL, date modified, subject area and, where present, further metadata present in the page header. Records from the harvested metadata are then presented via a Web interface to the Hub's data providers for review, editing, completion of the metadata and submission to the Hub's main database. Of course, data providers may also create records from scratch but at least they may check that a basic or full record does not already exist for the site. To enable the delivery of relevant records to data-providers it is necessary to provide a means of authentication. Data-providers register with the Hub and, through the use of a username and password, can access their own customised editing environment. Within this environment records relevant to the provider's subject expertise may be created, edited, rejected. Records may also be reviewed and links automatically checked. And the combination of authentication (which automates the creation of the metadata about the metadata) and a customised environment allows data-providers to export the records they have created for use, for example, within their own site or imported into a library catalogue (exporting will be in the form of HTML, XML/RDF, and MARC in the first instance).

The reuse of records by data-providers also places them within the sphere of the Hub's users. Indeed, it is an aim of the Hub to market itself as a 'gateway provider' as well as a gateway. The development of systems which permit the exporting of data and its reuse locally will hopefully assist individuals and organisations who have the subject expertise to evaluate and describe resources but have neither the resources nor the desire to maintain links, develop databases, or code HTML. Eventually, we envisage a user, whether a researcher, librarian or student, visiting the Hub, searching and browsing for records relevant to their interests, selecting and saving records as they proceed through Humbul, and then, on finishing, being presented with some piece of code for insertion within their own local Web page. In this manner, a lecturer, for example, can continue to create course pages but, on pasting a piece of code within the local web page, records served direct from Humbul can be dynamically inserted within the page each time the page is accessed. The lecturer need only select the records, create a basic web page, insert the magic code, and leave the maintenance of the records (like link checking) to Humbul.

The Diary

By the end of June 2000 the new Humbul will hopefully have been launched complete with new input and retrieval systems together with enough data to make it worth visiting. The poster session will show via visual images and oral discussion a comparison between the partial vision outlined above and the actual process by which the modules were built and tied together; the combining of human and automated effort (and the risks inherent with undertaking either); an outline of how the Hub intends to cut costs and make money; and a summary of how collaborating with Humbul as an advisor, an evaluator, a describer, or a cataloguer might result in mutual and tangible benefits for all parties.

References

Fraser, M. (1999) "Selecting Resources for a Subject Gateway: Who Decides?" ACH-ALLC Conference 1999. University of Virginia.
Stephens, C. (1997) "HUMBUL Updated: Gateway to Humanities Resources on the Web." Computers & Texts 15: 23.