From SIGLE to OpenSIGLE and Beyond: An In-depth Look
at Resource Migration in the European Context
Schöpfel, Joachim; Stock, Christiane & Henrot, Nathalie (
Abstract:
In 1980, some major European
scientific information centres established the “System for Information on Grey
Literature in
Nevertheless, the former EAGLE
member consented to preserve the European co-operation for grey literature and
to transform the 1980 model into a sustainable network in the emerging
environment of open access to scientific information.
The first step was to archive the
SIGLE records in an open and freely searchable database, conform to the OAI
metadata harvesting protocol. The French INIST developed OpenSIGLE based on MIT
software (DSpace) and loaded most of the SIGLE records in a simplified XML
format.
The communication provides an overview of the short history of SIGLE and
EAGLE and describes how this unique resource was moved from a traditional host
to an open access environment, giving the database a new look while preserving
essential features characteristic for SIGLE.
Notes
on the authors:
Joachim Schöpfel
graduated from the
Contact address: Dr. Joachim Schöpfel, INIST-CNRS, 2 allée du Parc de
Brabois, 54519 Vandoeuvre Cedex, France. E-Mail: joachim.schopfel@inist.fr
Christiane Stock graduated from the
Contact address: Christiane Stock, INIST-CNRS, 2
allée du Parc de Brabois, 54519 Vandoeuvre Cedex, France. E-mail:
christiane.stock@inist.fr
Nathalie Henrot graduated in History, then in
Information Sciences from the
Contact address: Nathalie Henrot, INIST-CNRS, 2 allée
du Parc de Brabois, 54519 Vandoeuvre Cedex, France
1. EAGLE, a short
history
In 1980, some major European
scientific information centres established the “System for Information on Grey
Literature in
The SIGLE database covered all
scientific domains, STM, social sciences and humanities. In 2005, it contained
855,260 records from 16 countries and the European Commission;
From 1980 to 1985, SIGLE was funded
by the Commission of the European Communities (CEC). When CEC financial support
ended in 1985, the national centres formed a network for the acquisition, identification
and dissemination of grey literature called “European Association for Grey
Literature Exploitation” or EAGLE, who became the producer of the SIGLE
database.
EAGLE was created as a non-profit
making association situated in Luxemburg. In the beginning, membership was
limited to the member countries of the European Union (former European
Community) but this limitation was abolished in
The economic model of the association
was based on initial funding by the European Commission, from 1985 onwards on
membership fees and royalties from servers and products (CD-ROM, records). The SIGLE
database was distributed by BLAISE, STN, EI and Ovid (Silverplatter) and in the
early nineties by SUNIST in
Costs were generated by the management
of the association and mainly by the operating agent, whose task was to merge
the national files into a unique server file every month.
2. Challenges and
dead-ends
Twenty years after its creation,
EAGLE faced four major challenges:
Internet and new technologies of
information and communication: SIGLE offered no solution for online
cataloguing, metadata harvesting, links to full-text and other resources.
Organisational structure: EAGLE was
unable to take important technical and organisational decisions. Main members resigned
from the association or intended to do so.
Coverage: National input became
increasingly unrepresentative of the national production of grey literature,
and input was continuously decreasing. Electronic documents were not referenced
in the database.
Economic model: Investment for the
development of the database was not provided.
EAGLE members were aware of these
challenges and discussed possible options and solutions. Nevertheless, the
organisational structure and the economic model of the non-profit making and
low budget association did not allow necessary strategy decisions. It also
became obvious then that no institutional member would invest more than its
membership fee and that another funding from the EU would be unlikely.
3. Liquidation of
EAGLE
In the face of this situation, the 2005
General Assembly from March 14, 2005, held at
After satisfaction of claims the
remaining funds were distributed on equal parts amongst the members, taking
into account the current memberships and the payment of the membership fees
during the last years.
The contracts with STN, EI, NERAC
and Ovid (SilverPlatter) were cancelled. The EAGLE website was deleted.
All usage rights of the SIGLE
database lapsed upon complete liquidation of the association while the
copyright on input remained with each member who supplied the records.
Nevertheless, the General Assembly asked the operating agent, the FIZ
Karlsruhe, for interim conservation of the SIGLE records in XML format beyond
the liquidation of SIGLE, for the purpose of archiving and integration into a
new European non- profit project. Nearly all of the former EAGLE members signed
a declaration of intention regarding this future use of their existing input of
the SIGLE database.
The complete liquidation of EAGLE was
published by the Luxemburg Register of Commerce and Societies at August 23,
2006.
4. Perspectives and projects beyond EAGLE
At the same General Assembly in 2005,
we presented the “MetaGrey Europe” project (see Schöpfel 2006). The objective
was to preserve the European co-operation for grey literature and to transform
the 1980 model into a sustainable network in the emerging environment of open access
to scientific information, especially in the context of the 2003 Berlin
Declaration.
The conditions were: no or low
budgeting, investment if possible only through direct and non-financial
contribution by participating structures (human resources…), no or small-scale
organisational structure. EU funding could be helpful (we investigated EU
Framework Programmes FP6 and FP7 options) but would generate too much executive
work.
The first step was to archive the
SIGLE records in an open and freely searchable database, compliant with the OAI
metadata harvesting protocol. This part of the project is nearly finished. The
French EAGLE member INIST developed OpenSIGLE based on MIT software (DSpace)
and loaded most of the SIGLE records in a simplified XML format.
The second step is the identification
and developing of European OAI initiatives for grey literature. Most of the
former EAGLE members already are involved in such projects, especially for
electronic theses and dissertations and reports, or intend to do so (see for
instance Boukacem-Zeghmouri & Schöpfel 2006 or Stock, Rocklin & Cordier
2006). What is needed is an inventory of these projects and if necessary,
technical and organisational assistance.
The third and most important step
will be the development of a gateway to European grey literature. Last year in
These two steps will be our
challenge for the coming years.
5. More information about the SIGLE database
Before talking about the migration
from the host-based database SIGLE to OpenSIGLE, allow us to recall some facts and
characteristics concerning SIGLE.
For each SIGLE member country, one
or two national structures assumed the acquisition, referencing and document
delivery of grey literature, mostly national libraries (UK, Luxembourg) or
documentation centres of national research organizations (Italy, France,
Germany). Merging of the national files was done by an independent operating
agent under contract and the database was hosted on up to three different
servers. A CD-ROM was produced from 1992 on by Silverplatter/Ovid.
Some characteristics
Cataloguing rules and classification
scheme were adopted from the INIS database produced by the IAEA (International
Atomic Energy Agency). The SIGLE classification is derived from the American COSATI
scheme. The same scheme is today used by GreySource (GreySource 2006). One
important difference to INIS is that SIGLE never included serials (only
collections of monographs) and never provided records on an analytical level.
Each national structure sent records
in its own language. A search through the entire database was made possible
through providing an English translation of the title or English keywords. One
of these fields was mandatory. This constraint may seem irrelevant from an
American point of view, but for some countries it was a considerable barrier to
increase input.
One of the goals of SIGLE from the
beginning was to facilitate access to grey documents in
- Each
record contained a clear mention of availability (with or without shelf number).
- Each
member country committed to supply the referenced document on demand, whether from
its own collections or through interlending service by back-up libraries.
- Useful
information on document supply (addresses, conditions) was given on specific
help pages or in user-guides.
Contents
SIGLE was started in 1980, but since
some members put in older documents, the earliest publications go back to the
sixties.
Although SIGLE was a multidisciplinary
database, about one third of the records were found in the humanities and
social sciences (>35%), followed by medical and life sciences (12%) and
physics (9 %). These figures were related to different practices of research
communities to publish white only or grey, but also to the willingness of
organizations to cooperate. Some of the documents existed only in three copies
and it was not always easy for the SIGLE centre to obtain one of them.
Among the document types one finds a
majority of reports, followed by doctoral theses or dissertations. In several
countries monthly files were obtained by conversion from other catalogues,
without a clear identification of the document type, so that the
"Miscellaneous" category is a "hold all" for these cases.
Over the years the content of the database
improved. For instance, since 1997 English abstracts were added, in particular
to Russian records. Members provided English keywords with increasing
frequency. Even so, another important project was never realized: the
integration of electronic documents, if possible with a link to the full text.
Instead members started to build institutional repositories or to provide
access to electronic grey literature by other means.
6. OpenSIGLE - moving the resources
Preliminaries
Once INIST decided to continue to
make SIGLE available and to allow free access, we looked for the tools.
Throughout frequent visits to institutional
or other repositories we had observed that not only non-textual documents
became more frequent in these repositories or archives, but also that an
increasing number of them provided only bibliographic records, without a link
to the full text. This is particularly true for sites where the records come
from catalogues, and the full text is added eventually
(see Groningen 2006). DOAR and ROAR (see DOAR 2006 and ROAR 2006) provide
useful information as to what kind of information awaits you in a given archive
or repository. So why not use an open source platform for SIGLE?
INIST had previously adopted the DSpace
software for 2 in-house applications: I-Revues, a platform for open access
journals and conferences (http://irevues.inist.fr),
and LARA, a repository for grey reports, which was presented at GL7 (http://lara.inist.fr).
So we were already familiar with
this platform, its advantages and its limits and constraints. Particularly
useful in this case, we had acquired a first experience through the two
aforementioned applications concerning a mass conversion and mass upload of
data into DSpace. FIZ Karlsruhe, the last SIGLE Data Processing Centre (DPC) in
office, had provided us with records in different formats, including XML, for
evaluation.
A quick comparison of the metadata
formats and indexes showed that it should be possible to move the SIGLE data to
this software without too great a loss in information details.
The next step was the writing of specifications
for the metadata conversion and the customization of DSpace. We also studied
closely the old CD-ROM version of SIGLE in order to include a maximum of
existing functionalities and indexes as well as online-helps in OpenSIGLE.
We were fortunate to have a student
in computer science, specialized in Web applications, A. Adlani, as an intern
for 10 weeks. With his help and invaluable suggestions, we were able to realize
a prototype close to the final version.
Metadata conversion and migration
DSpace uses a qualified Dublin Core
metadata set which is less detailed than the SIGLE metadata we received from
the DPC (see DSpace Metadata 2006). FIZ
Karlsruhe provided us with records in XML written in the SIGLE format and
completed by some server-related fields. Therefore mapping was relatively easy,
except for some coded fields and specific information. For example we wanted the
English title to appear systematically in the field labelled "Title".
In the source record it could be either in the field for the original title or
in the field for the English title. Several specific fields from the source
format were merged to one field for OpenSIGLE. Others were defined differently
to fit with the metadata set. Some qualified fields were added to the metadata set
used by DSpace without disturbing the OAI compliance: conference title, report
number and availability statement.
The most significant change was a
simplification in the document type information. The original SIGLE format
distinguished between document type and literature indicator, but diverging
conversion practices led to inconsistencies. In OpenSIGLE we propose a
simplified list of the principal document types.
For the tests we used the French
data and a selection of 1400 records from different countries provided by FIZ
Karlsruhe. Several test uploads showed us inconsistencies in the display of
data, which we tried to amend as far as possible. Those differences were due to
either an "evolution" of some elements over the years or a change of
the rules such as the constraint to provide an English title. This is why some
recent records showed no information at all in the title column in the results
display. Instead it now mentions "No title". Some fields in the
source records came in a coded form (language, subject categories and document
types). We tried as far as possible to convert them into full wording (e.g. inconsistencies
for the language codes). We did not try to amend information which came with
typing errors in the input files such as publication dates like 3001.
7. OpenSIGLE on DSpace: new presentation and new
look
DSpace allows organizing the
contents of a repository according to communities and collections. INIST
decided to use 2 types of communities: the member countries and SIGLE subject
categories on their primary level. Each country or subject category holds a
collection of records. Some minor and less used subject categories were
regrouped in one collection. In a mass upload on DSpace each records (or item)
can be "attributed" to only one community or collection. We decided
to choose the first classification code of each record. Since the files of each
member country are treated separately, it is possible to declare also the
country community for each record.
Contrary to the CD-ROM version the
document type is no longer searchable in OpenSIGLE. We found it interesting to
display the information in the list of results, along with the title, the
authors and the publication date. This is not a feature of the basic version of
DSpace, but we observed similar practices in other repositories (see ERA 2006
and Glasgow 2006).
The SIGLE classification scheme with
its 246 subject sub-categories can be
searched through the subject field, either by its code or its wording. A
specific help page accessible at any moment lists the complete classification
schemes with both the codes and their description. As mentioned above, the
subject areas were reduced to 15 entries for the organization of the database
in collections and for browsing purposes.
For OpenSIGLE we chose the latest
stable version available of the software which was then DSpace 1.3.2. One of
the new features in this version is the support of multilingualism of the user interface
(cf. DSpace system documentation 2006) This
feature has been developed a little bit further by our student and OpenSIGLE
can be used with interfaces in English (which is the main version), French,
German and Italian, the four most representative languages for the database. The
help pages and the "About" information are available in English and
French only, since they must be translated specifically.
Document supply being very important
for the SIGLE database, we decided to add an order form to facilitate the
contact of the holder of the document or ex-EAGLE member. Of course the
information about the document availability in each record was maintained, in a
specific field. In addition we give updated information for each participating centre
on the pages presenting the countries (in the "Countries" collections).
Last, but not least we customized
the user interface with the help of our student: look, colours, size etc.
8. OpenSIGLE: results and outlook
The new OpenSIGLE repository gives
open access to the bibliographic records of the SIGLE database from the members
who signed the agreement.
With the migration to the DSpace
platform look and presentation have changed.
Some data like the language or the
document type are no longer searchable, but are still displayed, even in the
list of results. The principal characteristics of the SIGLE database have been
preserved or even improved. Access to the full text will be facilitated through
an order form for document delivery and for some records hopefully through
links to the electronic version in the future. Since the records are organized
in collections based on the subject categories, and the OAI protocol for
metadata harvesting considers collections as sets, a selective harvesting by
subject will be possible.
More generally, OpenSIGLE seems to
be the first migration of an important traditional bibliographic database into
an OAI compliant environment. Some factors facilitated this migration: For the
mapping of the metadata we had the advantage to pass from a very detailed
format to a simpler one. The whole project benefited largely from our previous experience
with DSpace and in particular from our knowledge about the import of records. Still
OpenSIGLE provided us with a new experience concerning mass uploads on an Open
Source platform; it is probably the most important upload for a DSpace
repository ever done.
Although no longer updated OpenSIGLE
remains a useful source identify and access to European grey literature. Three
future developments may improve the visibility and usability of OpenSIGLE:
Links to the full text: Even if the new
repository contains only bibliographic records, links from the OpenSIGLE
metadata to the electronic full text where available are technically possible
but have to be provided by the former EAGLE members.
Completion of content: Hopefully,
those of the former EAGLE members who didn’t sign the declaration of intention
yet may reconsider their position and agree to the import of “their” national
SIGLE input into the new database.
Referencing: Linking the OpenSIGLE
records to scientific or general search engines, as a part of the MetaGrey
Europe project, would largely enhance the visibility of the European grey
documents of the last 20 years.
The OpenSIGLE database will be available
in the next weeks at the address http://opensigle.inist.fr.
Comments and remarks are welcome!
Acknowledgments to Anouar Adlani, a
master student in information sciences from the Nancy university, and to Patrick
Kremer from the INIST information system department for their helpful ideas and
assistance during the preparation and implementation of the OpenSIGLE database.
Bibliography and resources
Boukacem-Zeghmouri, C. &
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(accessed November 2006)
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