EnviA – Coordinating Improved Environmental Information Access and Discovery

Abstract

The British Library is working with the UK public sector partnership, Living with Environmental Change (LWEC), to enhance access to and co-ordinate discovery of environmental information, with an initial focus on flooding research. Flooding is a substantial environmental concern in the UK, and is likely to be more so as a result of climate change. Flood risk management was highlighted as an area of priority in the UK Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, and is also central to the research strategy of the LWEC partner organisations. This initial focus provides the British Library and its partners with a welldefined, cross-sector research audience to engage with in an area of growing importance. This poster sets out how we are working with the UK flooding community to understand their information needs and practices, identifying where we can add value, and piloting novel methods to enhance on-line information access and discovery. Producers and consumers of environmental information come from a diverse range of backgrounds, and use information and data in a variety of different contexts. Our research revealed inequalities in awareness of, and access to, environmental science information resources. Although the environmental research information needs of academics are largely well served, researchers and decision-makers in consultancies, local governments and charities/non-governmental organisations would benefit from better access to government reports, legislation, and datasets. Envia (Environmental Information Access and Discovery) is the British Library’s project to develop a pilot service to streamline access to resources that are held at disparate locations, and facilitate discovery of content that is often buried within websites and repositories. We are working closely with LWEC partners to ensure we co-ordinate rather than duplicate effort. We aim to enable users to access content from multiple locations by embedding the demonstrator search function within websites users visit to access information. The demonstrator will provide access to a variety of types of information relevant to flooding research, as well as evaluating the potential of semantic annotation to enhance discovery and the end userexperience. The technical challenges are not insubstantial, however. For example, a large proportion of textual information currently used by the flood researchers is not in journal articles and may only be available in PDF format. This poses challenges to discovery layer services such as text-mining and automated metadata enrichment that underpin search across a mixed corpus of information. Envia will see us working closely with LWEC partners to inform build and testing of the demonstrator, in parallel to evaluating a range of factors that will influence our longer term plans to develop a pilot service after March 2012.