Home | Multimedia digital service delivery (Summary)
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e-serials
Electronic serials may be defined very broadly as any journal, magazine, e'zine, Webzine, newsletter or electronic serial publication which is available over the Internet. e-serials are already an issue for public libraries, through free access to Web-based newspapers and journals as well as fee-based, full-text CD-ROM and Web publications, There are currently two main formats:

• e-mail based e-serials typically use plain text and are more commonly described as newsletters. Users 'subscribe' through an e-mail message, and the newsletter is delivered straight to their e-mailboxes.

• Web-based. Currently, most e-serials are made available via Web pages using either HTML or PDF. These include electronic daily newspapers. A growing number do not have a print equivalent.

e-serials are either supplied directly by the publishers themselves or via aggregator services such as OCLC or EBSCO which provide access to and manage a large selection of e-serials on the library's behalf, removing the need to negotiate a set of individual licences and prices with a number of different journal publishers.

Where an e-journal is held on the suppliers' servers, copyright agreements with publishers may restrict access and use. It is important to consider the payment model involved: some suppliers require both a print and electronic subscription. Model licenses are available which libraries can use as a starting point for negotiation (see also copyright & legal issues.)

The move to e-serials may cause preservation problems. With hard copy serials libraries are generally entitled to retain back issues. This is not usually the case with e-serials and libraries should ensure that their licence covers them to retain ‘old’ editions if they wish to maintain a backrun.

Libraries may also find themselves facing pressure to rationalise print holdings in order to justify/afford the move to electronic versions. This can sometimes be surprisingly complicated, especially where the electronic holdings are ‘bundled’ together as part of various package deals.

The Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) in the UK operates several co-operative buying schemes for academic libraries and some public libraries are also beginning to co-operate on a local, regional or subject basis, to licence e-content (see Clumps).

Some public libraries are starting to make multimedia content - e-books, e-serials etc, available to remote users via their websites. In order to meet licence restrictions users usually have to be library members and to authenticate themselves in some way, perhaps by means of a PIN code, to access the materials, see authentication.

Streaming video
Although availability of adequate bandwidth is an issue for high quality digital video, those with good connections to the Internet can already find watchable streaming video. Broadband can be defined as anything streaming at a rate in excess of 56kbs but speeds may go up to 700kbs or beyond. Direct Internet access via ISDN, cable modem or a T3 connection (or better) should enable access to most video material.

Video can be created, stored and delivered using the following formats:

• the appropriate MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) format (MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4)

• proprietary formats such as: AVI - Audio Video Interleave; ASF - Advanced Streaming Format; Apple Quicktime

The use of emerging new W3C standards such as SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration) and WebCGM should be considered.

Videoconferencing
This enables two or more people in different places to see and hear each other, and sometimes share work together on their computers. It is already an important contribution to the solution of problems, for example, in distance education (see also guideline on lifelong learning). For public libraries, videoconferencing can help support lifelong learning for both staff and community (see also lifelong learning) and to provide socially inclusive access see also social inclusion and as a tool for branch/agency communication and community outreach.

Hardware, software, and bandwidth are all necessary to make videoconferencing communication happen. The basic ingredients for a video conference, include cameras, microphones, speakers, workstations, high-speed connections, and video clients and possibly a wired conference room.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Many of the enquiries made of libraries and their on-line systems have a geographical question at their core e.g. ‘where is….’; where can I find…. ‘are there any…. in’, ‘who lives at…’. Street and land maps, voters’ lists, weather maps, satellite images and environmental information are part of the resource which may be used to answer these enquiries.

Geographical Information Systems are programs designed to capture, manipulate and display data referenced by spatial or geographic co-ordinates. They are used for solving complex planning and management problems and also to store and preserve paper maps. The potential of GIS systems to improve the way information is organised, manipulated and presented can be seen when one considers that as much as 80% of the data collected at government level in the UK and the USA has a geospatial referent.

There are two basic structures for manipulating geospatial images and graphics on a computer:

• Raster images come as pixels, to each of which a value has been attributed e.g. colour, height or an ID number. A raster image can be generated by digital scanning.

• Vector data comes in the form of points and lines that are geometrically associated. Points are stored using co-ordinates and lines as pairs of points. Vector data must be acquired by some process of measurement.

Many online or Internet resources now have searchable GIS interfaces. Although the building blocks for public libraries to develop their own local GIS-based services are still relatively complex, it is becoming more feasible to do so, especially in the context of the wider service, technological and licensing environment of a whole local authority.

The technology has now gone beyond the mere digital storage of information which could be found on a 2D paper map and there are now datasets which could not exist in any but a digital format. The construction of a fully functional GIS interface usually requires the integration of software components and data (middleware, basemaps), attention to the control of terminology for place names (e.g. a gazetteer) and linkage to a controlled set of keys (post codes, grid references etc) for those places. Some mapping services are available at national and European level free of charge over the Internet e.g. Multimap.

The seamlessUK project is developing a citizens' gateway to community information from multiple distributed information datasets. Although the system will have a national portal it is expected that most users will access it from their local portals - 9 portals are being developed each covering a different geographical locality. The project has encountered a number of different issues which, taken together, make the provision of geographical search facilities quite challenging:

• by and large most data sets do not contain very sophisticated geospatial references - most databases for example do not contain grid references or northern and eastern bounding co-ordinates. Some do not even contain a postcode. This means that the system has to be capable of quite sophisticated 'mapping', based on a combination of geographical products - gazetteers etc. - in order to enable users to search by postal town or postcode for example;

• some of the datasets are national in coverage, which means that the system needs to be configured to send 'default' geographic 'limiters' from each of the local portals so that a user searching for doctors on the Essex portal only receives information on doctors in Essex, even though they just typed 'doctors';

• some of the datasets are non-geographic - for example information on welfare benefits. It is not very easy to explain to users that if they search geographically they will not necessarily return all the information that might be relevant to their query;

• the system is distributed which means that many datasources are searched at the same time and they may take variable amounts of time to respond. This means that the system cannot support a 'find my nearest' facility because the response time for all of the targets to return all of their results - so that the system can then analyse the hits to find the nearest ones - is unpredictable;

• there are some tensions between devising a functionally sophisticated search system and the need to make the interface very user friendly and simple to use which take careful working through.

As more and more geographic and cartographic data goes over to a primarily digital form librarians will have to grasp the nettle of providing GIS and its supporting hardware to the public. There are however a number of issues that libraries need to take into account:

• The hardware for running GIS needs to be powerful because GIS datasets tend to be large and the faster the computer the less time it takes to do the computing and display the results.

• High bandwidth network and Internet connections will be required for the same reasons. (see delivery channels). Large monitors are desirable, plotters and printers need to be acquired.

• The rapid advance of the technology will mean the continual replacement of obsolescent hardware and this must be budgeted for.

• Staff will have to be trained or special staff recruited, as most members of the public will not be able to use any but the most basic GIS applications without help.

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