OpenSIGLE
Encyclopedia
The OpenSIGLE repository provides open access to the bibliographic records of the former SIGLE
database. The creation of the OpenSIGLE archive was decided by some major European STI centres, members of the former European network EAGLE for the collection and dissemination of grey literature (European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation
). OpenSIGLE was developed by the French INIST
-CNRS, with assistance from the German FIZ Karlsruhe and the Dutch Grey Literature Network Service
(GreyNet). OpenSIGLE is hosted on an INIST-CNRS server at Nancy. Part of the open access initiative, OpenSIGLE is referenced by the international Directory of Open Access Repositories OpenDOAR.
dedicated to grey literature. Up to 15 European partners participated in SIGLE, mostly national libraries or important research libraries. Created in 1980 and produced from 1984 onwards by EAGLE (European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation), the database was last available through STN International and on CD-ROM via Silverplatter/Ovid Technologies
, until it stopped input in 2005. Together with other former EAGLE members, INIST decided to make the data publicly available on an open access platform. The OpenSIGLE website went live in December 2007.
OpenSIGLE is indexed by Google
and Google Scholar
, integrated in the portal of the WorldWideScience
Alliance and included in the bookmarks of national libraries and research institutes.
platform 1.3.2. In the following the database migrated to DSpace version 1.4. It is available under the Creative Commons
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) License.
metadata
set less detailed than the SIGLE metadata received from the former SIGLE operating agent DPC (FIZ Karlsruhe). The FIZ Karlsruhe XML
records were written in the SIGLE format and completed by some server-related fields.
Several specific fields from the source format were merged to one field for OpenSIGLE. For example in the SIGLE record the English title could be either in the field for the original title or in the field for the English title. In the OpenSIGLE metadata, the English title appears systematically in the field labelled "Title".
Other fields 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. OpenSIGLE proposes a simplified list of the principal document types.
http://www.greynet.org/greysourceindex/documenttypes.html
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 INIST 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 bit further by a LIS student and OpenSIGLE can now be used with interfaces in English (the main version), French, German and Italian. These are the four most representative languages in the database. The help pages and the "About" information are available in English and French only, since they must be translated specifically.
Document delivery being very important for the SIGLE database, INIST decided to add an order form to facilitate contact with the holder of the document (former EAGLE member) and the information about the document’s availability in each record. In addition INIST gives updated information for each participating centre on each of the "Countries" pages.
Last but not least, with the help of a LIS student INIST were able to customize the user interface enhancing its look, colour, font size, etc.
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 (Open Archives Initiative
) compliant environment. Some factors facilitated this migration, e.g. the mapping of the metadata from a verpeny detailed format to a simpler one. The whole project benefited largely from INIST-CNRS previous experience with DSpace and in particular from knowledge about the import of records. Still OpenSIGLE provided INIST-CNRS 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.
Perspectives for the future developments of the OpenSIGLE archive are:
At the 12th International Conference on Grey Literature at Prague (GL12) in December 2010, INIST-CNRS presented a new project called OpenGrey. OpenGrey signifies a new website with OAI-PMH, improved research facilities and export of records. OpenGrey also includes recent records and links to the full text. At the Prague conference, INIST
and GreyNet
called former SIGLE
members and new partners to contribute to OpenGrey.
record, which encompasses standardized PDF attachments of the full-text conference preprint
s, PowerPoint presentations, abstracts and biographical notes.
In 2010, OpenSIGLE provides open access to some 200 conference papers on grey literature, from 1995 to 2009. Twenty-one, full-text papers from the Second International Conference on Grey Literature held in Washington D.C. on November 2-3, 1995 were added in March 2010. GreyNet purchased permission last year from Emerald to make openly accessible the papers published in the GL Conference Proceedings from 1994 to 2000. These earlier collections are added to the more recent collections in the OpenSIGLE Repository. The work involved relies on the efforts of INIST-CNRS as service provider and GreyNet as data provider. By autumn 2010, it is anticipated that all of the papers in the International Conference Series on Grey Literature will be fully accessible via the OpenSIGLE Repository.
OpenSIGLE participates in the WorldWideScience
global science gateway.
Siglé
Siglé is a town in the Siglé Department of Boulkiemdé Province in central western Burkina Faso. It is the capital of Siglé Department and has a population of 2224.-External links:*...
database. The creation of the OpenSIGLE archive was decided by some major European STI centres, members of the former European network EAGLE for the collection and dissemination of grey literature (European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation
European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation
The “European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation” was created in 1985 by European scientific and technical information centres and libraries in order to produce the bibliographic database “System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe” .The objective was to improve information...
). OpenSIGLE was developed by the French INIST
INIST
The INIST is the CNRS centre of documentation. It has as mission to collect, treat and diffuse results of scientific and technical research. The INIST produces three bibliographic multilingual and multidisciplinary databases: PASCAL, FRANCIS, and DOGE. It is based at Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, in a...
-CNRS, with assistance from the German FIZ Karlsruhe and the Dutch Grey Literature Network Service
Grey Literature Network Service
The Grey Literature Network Service is a service to facilitate the production, distribution and access to grey literature. Grey literature is "information produced and distributed on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by...
(GreyNet). OpenSIGLE is hosted on an INIST-CNRS server at Nancy. Part of the open access initiative, OpenSIGLE is referenced by the international Directory of Open Access Repositories OpenDOAR.
History of OpenSIGLE
SIGLE (System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe) was a unique multidisciplinary bibliographic databaseBibliographic database
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc...
dedicated to grey literature. Up to 15 European partners participated in SIGLE, mostly national libraries or important research libraries. Created in 1980 and produced from 1984 onwards by EAGLE (European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation), the database was last available through STN International and on CD-ROM via Silverplatter/Ovid Technologies
Ovid Technologies
Ovid Technologies, Inc. , part of the Wolters Kluwer group of companies, provides access to online bibliographic databases, journals and other products, chiefly in the area of health sciences...
, until it stopped input in 2005. Together with other former EAGLE members, INIST decided to make the data publicly available on an open access platform. The OpenSIGLE website went live in December 2007.
OpenSIGLE is indexed by Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
and Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...
, integrated in the portal of the WorldWideScience
WorldWideScience
WorldWideScience.org is a global science search engine designed to accelerate scientific discovery and progress by accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge...
Alliance and included in the bookmarks of national libraries and research institutes.
Implementation of OpenSIGLE
OpenSIGLE was developed on a MIT DSpaceDSpace
DSpace is an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for an institutional repository. It supports a wide variety of data, including books, theses, 3D digital scans of objects, photographs, film, video, research data...
platform 1.3.2. In the following the database migrated to DSpace version 1.4. It is available under the Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) License.
OpenSIGLE metadata
DSpace uses a qualified Dublin CoreDublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...
metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
set less detailed than the SIGLE metadata received from the former SIGLE operating agent DPC (FIZ Karlsruhe). The FIZ Karlsruhe XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
records were written in the SIGLE format and completed by some server-related fields.
Several specific fields from the source format were merged to one field for OpenSIGLE. For example in the SIGLE record the English title could be either in the field for the original title or in the field for the English title. In the OpenSIGLE metadata, the English title appears systematically in the field labelled "Title".
Other fields 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
OAI
-Personal name:* Oai was the common nickname of Saigō-no-Tsubone , a figure in the history of feudal Japan.-Organizations:OAI, as an initialism, may refer to:*Ohio Aerospace Institute, a space grant college...
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. OpenSIGLE proposes a simplified list of the principal document types.
http://www.greynet.org/greysourceindex/documenttypes.html
OpenSIGLE content
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 record (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
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
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 INIST 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 bit further by a LIS student and OpenSIGLE can now be used with interfaces in English (the main version), French, German and Italian. These are the four most representative languages in the database. The help pages and the "About" information are available in English and French only, since they must be translated specifically.
Document delivery being very important for the SIGLE database, INIST decided to add an order form to facilitate contact with the holder of the document (former EAGLE member) and the information about the document’s availability in each record. In addition INIST gives updated information for each participating centre on each of the "Countries" pages.
Last but not least, with the help of a LIS student INIST were able to customize the user interface enhancing its look, colour, font size, etc.
OpenSIGLE functionalities and perspectives
With the migration to the DSpace platform look and presentation of the former SIGLE records 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
Bibliographic database
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc...
into an OAI (Open Archives Initiative
Open Archives Initiative
The Open Archives Initiative is an attempt to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content . It allows people to harvest metadata...
) compliant environment. Some factors facilitated this migration, e.g. the mapping of the metadata from a verpeny detailed format to a simpler one. The whole project benefited largely from INIST-CNRS previous experience with DSpace and in particular from knowledge about the import of records. Still OpenSIGLE provided INIST-CNRS with a new experience concerning mass uploads on an Open Source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
platform. It is probably the most important upload for a DSpace repository ever done.
Perspectives for the future developments of the OpenSIGLE archive are:
- Uploading the French data from 2005 onwards and thus closing the gap between the SIGLE and OpenSIGLE records.
- Integrating links to the full text whenever it exists. 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.
- Inclusion of the Dutch SIGLE records. 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.
- Inclusion of current records from other countries.
- Integrating OpenSIGLE into other networks and portals. Linking the OpenSIGLE records to scientific or general search engines will largely enhance the visibility of the European grey documents of the last 20 years.
At the 12th International Conference on Grey Literature at Prague (GL12) in December 2010, INIST-CNRS presented a new project called OpenGrey. OpenGrey signifies a new website with OAI-PMH, improved research facilities and export of records. OpenGrey also includes recent records and links to the full text. At the Prague conference, INIST
INIST
The INIST is the CNRS centre of documentation. It has as mission to collect, treat and diffuse results of scientific and technical research. The INIST produces three bibliographic multilingual and multidisciplinary databases: PASCAL, FRANCIS, and DOGE. It is based at Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, in a...
and GreyNet
Grey Literature Network Service
The Grey Literature Network Service is a service to facilitate the production, distribution and access to grey literature. Grey literature is "information produced and distributed on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by...
called former SIGLE
Siglé
Siglé is a town in the Siglé Department of Boulkiemdé Province in central western Burkina Faso. It is the capital of Siglé Department and has a population of 2224.-External links:*...
members and new partners to contribute to OpenGrey.
OpenSIGLE and GreyNet
For the past 15 years, GreyNet has sought to serve researchers and authors in the field of grey literature. To further this end, GreyNet has signed on to the OpenSIGLE repository and in so doing seeks to preserve and make openly available research results originating in the International Conference Series on Grey Literature. GreyNet together with INIST-CNRS have designed the format for a metadataMetadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
record, which encompasses standardized PDF attachments of the full-text conference preprint
Preprint
A preprint is a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.-Role:Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, because manuscripts must undergo extensive...
s, PowerPoint presentations, abstracts and biographical notes.
In 2010, OpenSIGLE provides open access to some 200 conference papers on grey literature, from 1995 to 2009. Twenty-one, full-text papers from the Second International Conference on Grey Literature held in Washington D.C. on November 2-3, 1995 were added in March 2010. GreyNet purchased permission last year from Emerald to make openly accessible the papers published in the GL Conference Proceedings from 1994 to 2000. These earlier collections are added to the more recent collections in the OpenSIGLE Repository. The work involved relies on the efforts of INIST-CNRS as service provider and GreyNet as data provider. By autumn 2010, it is anticipated that all of the papers in the International Conference Series on Grey Literature will be fully accessible via the OpenSIGLE Repository.
OpenSIGLE participates in the WorldWideScience
WorldWideScience
WorldWideScience.org is a global science search engine designed to accelerate scientific discovery and progress by accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge...
global science gateway.
See also
- Scientific literatureScientific literatureScientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within a scientific field is often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of placing the results of one's research into the...
- SIGLESigléSiglé is a town in the Siglé Department of Boulkiemdé Province in central western Burkina Faso. It is the capital of Siglé Department and has a population of 2224.-External links:*...
- Open Archives InitiativeOpen Archives InitiativeThe Open Archives Initiative is an attempt to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content . It allows people to harvest metadata...
- Grey literature
- DSpaceDSpaceDSpace is an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for an institutional repository. It supports a wide variety of data, including books, theses, 3D digital scans of objects, photographs, film, video, research data...
- Grey Literature Network ServiceGrey Literature Network ServiceThe Grey Literature Network Service is a service to facilitate the production, distribution and access to grey literature. Grey literature is "information produced and distributed on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by...
- Open access (publishing)
- WorldWideScienceWorldWideScienceWorldWideScience.org is a global science search engine designed to accelerate scientific discovery and progress by accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge...
External links
- OpenSIGLE http://opensigle.inist.fr/
- OpenGrey http://www.opengrey.eu/
- World Wide Science http://www.worldwidescience.org