Ofis/RefBase meeting

Marlon, Vu, Ray, Jack, Daniel met with Colin Bell, IQC; regrets from Allan Bell, Library.

• Colin explained further about his/library's ideas
• IQC currently runs refbase for their own researchers. Would like to combine with a campus-wide refbase run by library. IQC's has 3000 records; in the process of sanitizing out redundancies. They think 500 or so are redundant.
  • Library has a lot of value to add: subscription to huge numbers of databases (incl. ISI; Reuters; ...) which feed the library fairly authoritative records of publications.
  • Library wants to put publications for UW community into one database.

• Refbase records a "DOI" for each publication; an authoritative lookup code useful elsewhere- given that, can go to abstract, or download the paper if on campus...

Q: Do we want to make a dump from OFIS to try and put it into some refbase install?

Complexitites:

• Duplicate data (Colin suggests co-ops at the library can deduplicate)
• ISI just reports published papers. (So we'd only get the publication year, not submission or accept year). So we'd have a lot of data that isn't auto-imported? And ...
• RefBase: Does it accommodate all of the types of records OFIS currently records? Don't know.
  • refbase record for "name": one field for all names?! Colin says it also can create split out data; don't know how at the moment. Ugh.
  • However; Colin says there are "Reuters" identifiers for each researcher which they claim should be a unique id.
  • RefBase schema splits up bibliographic entry into parts, which OFIS just switched away from. Good- most of our data is still split apart. Bad- if there are things we need to start recording manually again, profs will be unhappy...

Steps: (each one is a milestone to decide if we should continue).

1. Now: compare schemas between OFIS and refbase.
   • Marlon and Colin will share.
2. Server... probably in engr. land. generic LAMP server.
3. general data import from OFIS to refbase.
   • and reconciliation - by library?
4. Maint. tasks: identify DOIs for publications; with a DOI, we can keep them non-redundant in the future?...

-- DanielAllen - 31 May 2010