Speaker
Rouven Schabinger (Swiss Library Service Platform)
Abstract
SLSP Ltd. (Swiss Library Service Platform) was founded in 2017 by 15 higher education institutions and libraries of Switzerland with the mission of consolidating the data sets of the six existing library consortia in Switzerland into a national platform, operating a centrally managed library system and offering centrally managed services for libraries. Today SLSP drives transformation for trustworthy information in Switzerland with around 500 libraries as part of the network, grouped in 31 institution zones. In addition to traditional academic libraries, this also includes the special case of patrimonial libraries, e.g., cantonal libraries.
Heritage data that is collected in those libraries can be exposed in several ways. Some of the cultural data of Switzerland is exposed via repositories[1]. Furthermore, there is already a wide range of cultural data and research data available in the common discovery platform swisscovery. This includes digital objects (over 1 TB) in the Cloud Library System Alma as well as external sources searchable via Primo VE. There are over 2 million records from over 60 institutional repositories, such as e-periodica, searchable in swisscovery among around 40 million of records of the libraries’ holdings in total.
In order to do justice to this dynamic data landscape SLSP is dealing with, there is a number of projects, such as a joint project called Connectome with Switch (national network operator for higher education institutions), supported by Swissuniversities.
Connectome’s goal is to follow the FAIR principles for data to be: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. It wants to harvest, harmonise, enrich and link the metadata of open data resources for research coming from varying spaces e.g. institutional repositories, administrations, NGOs, galleries, museums, archives, and libraries. They developed the Open Data Navigator which acts as a national open data aggregator. The discovery experience is enhanced by recommendation systems based on Artificial Intelligence (Language Models) and semantic relationships amongst collected resources.
The connection with the research platform swisscovery can offer added value, but also raises various questions that will be addressed in a proof of concept. Which user stories should be considered for this approach? What does the technical integration look like, e.g. through GraphQL? What dependencies are there with ExLibris Primo VE? One key synergy of SLSP and the Connectome project is the guidance of end-users to relevant resources related to their search criteria in the Swiss research landscape by means of visualisation and providing contextual information.
This contribution aims to provide an overview of the data available in swisscovery and its handling by SLSP as well as deliver insights into the current state of the case study of the Connectome Project.