The Internet offers great potential for co-operation between gateway services, since it allows geographically distributed databases and people to communicate with one other and to work together to build integrated services.

Co-operation between gateways is increasingly being seen as a strategy for:

• enhancing Internet resource discovery for end-users
• improving the efficiency and sustainability of gateway services

There are a number of different models for collaborative work, and, as gateways are still a relatively new type of information service, there is still much scope for exploring the potential of co-operation. Those running gateways should consider the benefits of, and opportunities for, co-operation with other gateways.

Why should a gateway consider co-operation with other gateways?

Enhancing Internet resource discovery for end-users

The development of a myriad of information gateways on the Web is, ironically, making it increasingly difficult for users to search the Internet effectively. Many gateways are claiming to offer a 'one-stop shop' for finding information and this may work for certain users; however, other users will benefit from searching more than one gateway. With lots of independent and uncoordinated gateways, this can involve making a series of searches in a number of services, all of which have different interfaces and ways of working. Not easy!

Collaboration can help gateways to offer integrated services for end-users. The advantages of this for users (depending on the co-operative model used) may include:

• access to far broader collections than any single gateway could offer, including high quality Internet resources on many subjects, from many countries, written in many languages
• access to a large number of metadata records via a single user-friendly interface
• the ability to locate new gateways that they may not have heard about
• the possibility of searching a selection of gateways simultaneously as opposed to one by one

Improving the efficiency and sustainability of gateway services

As more organisations invest in building gateway services, more opportunity for collaborative work arises. Collaboration can help organisations to develop their gateways more efficiently and effectively. It can also help them to sustain the gateways in the longer term. The advantages of co-operation for organisations may include being able to:

• use established technologies, methods and practices - and avoid starting from scratch
• divide responsibilities for creating or sharing metadata records - and avoid duplication of effort
• combine effort for technical development - and avoid repetition of work and errors
• create joint publicity, training and promotion
• share staff effort (management/technical/administrative/cataloguing) - to make organisational efficiencies
• create shared strategies for long-term sustainability

All of these factors have the potential to improve the service that an organisation can offer to its target users.

For some organisations, there will be a greater imperative for collaboration if they have a remit for creating a more comprehensive service than resources will allow. This applies particularly to libraries, which are often expected to offer access to large collections, despite having limited resources to build them.

Disadvantages of co-operation

There can be political or funding issues that rule out co-operation; indeed in some cases gateways will see competition as a natural alternative to collaboration! Disadvantages of gateway co-operation may include:

1. Extra expense.

To make some models for co-operation work, some extra effort will be required to set up the necessary systems. For example, to make gateways interoperable some work needs to be done on making different classification schemes, metadata formats and collection development policies compatible. In the longer term, savings may be made from having co-operative strategies but the initial setup may be too expensive to consider.

2. Intellectual property rights.

There is an issue surrounding ownership of metadata records which may stand in the way of co-operation. Gateways may have invested considerable resources into creating records and be unwilling to share them or give them away for free. The issue of intellectual property rights on the Internet is still a new one with some unresolved issues, and gateways would need to investigate these before entering co-operative agreements.

3. Agreeing on aims and objectives.

Gateways may have incompatible aims and objectives. Having developed with particular audiences in mind, they may have reservations about the value of co-operation for their users which need to be resolved. There may also be issues for funders or sponsors of gateways who have vested interests which need to be considered.

In the library world, co-operative agreements that support information search and retrieval are commonplace. For example, national libraries each take responsibility for collecting materials published in their country and then offer users access to these collections via inter-library loans. Another example is the sharing of cataloguing effort, where groups of libraries work together to create union catalogues and where the catalogue records are shared and re-used by many libraries, regardless of which library actually created the record.

This co-operation enables libraries to:

• offer users access to far broader collections than could be offered by any single library
• offer users a more comprehensive catalogue than could be created by a single library
• achieve efficiencies in cataloguing and collection development without reducing the level of service to users

Such co-operation translates well into the Internet environment and the development of information gateways. Collaboration is particularly pertinent to organisations with a remit for providing access to scientific, cultural and educational resources on a large scale.

A number of different models for co-operation between gateways exist:

Co-operative agreements for metadata records

Gateways can create co-operative agreements regarding metadata records:

Co-operative agreements for creating metadata records

Gateways can share the effort required to create metadata records by dividing responsibilities. For example, a group of gateways can agree that each should spend time creating records for different parts of the Internet, each focusing its efforts on records for resources in a particular subject, language or from a particular country.

Co-operative agreements for using metadata records

Metadata records can be shared and re-used, and are not confined to the service which created them or to being used in only one service. Agreements on intellectual property rights would need to be established, and work is being done in this area, but the potential exists for gateways to create agreements that enable them to offer users access to records that have been created through a distributed network of gateways. Building integrated services

Co-operation can lead to the development of integrated gateway services, which offer users access to a number of gateways via a single interface. This interface might offer different levels of functionality:

Guiding users to other gateways/mirrors of gateways

The simplest form of co-operation is for gateways to point to other gateways that might support the user group. This may involve offering a set of hyperlinks to other related gateways, or offering mirrors of related gateways where access could be improved by keeping a local copy of the service. Although each of the gateways would have to be searched serially, the user would be alerted to other gateway services which they might not have otherwise found.

Fully integrating distributed gateways into a single service

In some cases it may be easier for users if they can access many gateways simultaneously. A fully integrated service offers users the chance to select a number of gateways and then to cross-search or cross-browse all the gateways in one go. A single interface offers users a single point of access to distributed gateway services. In some cases it will not be necessary to disclose to users the fact that they are searching distributed databases.

Gateways may offer different interfaces to the same collection of metadata records. For example, a shared pool of metadata records can be developed, where each gateway contributes records to the pool, but creates its own interface to the data. In this way, different user groups can be offered a tailor-made interface and gateway service.

Co-operation between gateways raises a number of interoperability issues. In the field of Internet resource discovery the term 'interoperability' refers to 'the transparent searching and retrieval of data from diverse systems and in different metadata formats' (Day, 1999).

A lot of research and development has been done on how gateways can be made to interoperate and this has highlighted the areas where standards are needed to make gateways interoperable. For gateways to co-operate they will need to work at:

• technical interoperability - search and retrieval protocols, software
• data interoperability - metadata formats, cataloguing rules

They will need to agree on:

• quality selection criteria and scope policies - to develop coherent collections and services
• areas of responsibility - to avoid duplication
• organisational/political/management issues

A fuller description of interoperability issues is given in the 'Interoperability' chapter in this handbook. However, this overview highlights some of the issues that are being tackled by existing gateways in the co-operative work described in the following sections.

Interoperability

Libraries and other organisations still have a lot of work to do on the political and organisational issues involved in co-operative work. However, a number of gateway projects are now able to demonstrate some of the ways in which issues of technical and data interoperability can be solved.

This section highlights a few examples of how gateways are co-operating in practical terms. These are ordered from examples of low-level co-operation, which is relatively easy to implement, to high-level co-operation, which requires agreements for a national or international strategy.

Are there any important initiatives in gateway co-operation? There is still much potential for co-operative strategies to be developed, particularly within the library community, but some strategies for co-operation are already developing.

Libraries, research organisations and educational establishments which are investing in the development of large-scale information gateways would be well advised to work together to create a co-operative strategy. Together they could provide the resources and expertise required to build a comprehensive collection of metadata records which describes large numbers of the high quality resources available on the Internet. Integrated services could offer users access to resources from many countries, on many subjects and in many languages.

An integrated service could offer users a valuable alternative to other Internet search tools such as search engines and directories, which are often either indiscriminate, pointing to resources of unknown quality, or popular, pointing to resources that are recreational as opposed to educational. An international network of information gateways could form the Internet equivalent of an academic research and education library, where users could go to locate high quality resources with confidence. This vision relies on co-operation and we hope that libraries and educational organisations will rise to the challenge.

cross-browsing - Browsing, where the Web pages contain resources from more than one gateway
cross-searching - Searching, where the search takes place across more than one gateway
DEF - Danmarks Elektroniske Forskningsbibliotek (Denmark's Electronic Research Library)
DESIRE - Project funded under the Europena Union's Telematics for research Programme to enhance and facilitate Web usage among researchers in Europe (producer of this handbookk)
EELS - Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden
EEVL - Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library
IMesh - An informal group for the discussion of international collaboration on Internet subject gateways
ISAAC - Project Isaac - A Distributed Architecture for Resource Discovery Using Metadata - managed by the Scout Project
RDN - Resource Discovery Network - the UK's centre for its national subject gateways
REYNARD - A project proposal for building a broker service to national gateways in Europe, managed by Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands
ROADS - ROADS is a set of software tools to enable the set up and maintenance of Web based subject gateways.
SOSIG - The Social Science Information Gateway

Biz/ed, http://www.bized.ac.uk

CrossROADS, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/crossroads/

DEF Project, http://www.deflink.dk/english/def.ihtml

DESIRE, http://www.desire.org/

EELS, http://www.ub.lu.se/eel/

EEVL, http://www.eevl.ac.uk/

IMesh, http://www.desire.org/html/subjectgateways/community/imesh/

ISAAC, http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/research/index.html

Pinakes, http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html

RDN, http://www.rdn.ac.uk/

ROADS, http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/

Scout Report Signpost, http://www.signpost.org/signpost/

SOSIG, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/

R. Heery, A. Powell & M. Day, CrossROADS and Interoperability, Ariadne, issue 14
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue14/metadata/

M. Day, ROADS Interoperability guidelines (1999)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/interoperability/

Chapter author: Emma Place

With contributions from: Traugott Koch and Ann-Sofie Zettergren