MODIFICATION
99 -- RFI-Request for Information-Normalization of Electronic Serial Content-LSM20120033 - Statement of Work
- Notice Date
- 3/26/2012
- Notice Type
- Modification/Amendment
- Contracting Office
- Library of Congress, Contracts Services, Contracts Section, 101 Independence Ave SE, LA-325, Washington, District of Columbia, 20540-9411
- ZIP Code
- 20540-9411
- Solicitation Number
- LSM20120033
- Archive Date
- 4/17/2012
- Point of Contact
- Arneen F Dozier, Phone: 202-707-0406
- E-Mail Address
-
adoz@loc.gov
(adoz@loc.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- Statement of Work Library of Congress eDeposit Program Request for information about normalized electronic serial content Contracting Office Address: Library of Congress Office of Contracts 101 Independence Avenue, SE Washington, D.C. 20540-9411 Description The Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) have long been interested in adding electronic publications to their collections. Since February 2010, the Library of Congress has exercised its legal authority under U.S. copyright law (17 USC 407) to issue mandatory deposit demand for files and associated metadata of electronic serials (journals, periodicals) which are published online only to be added to the Library's collections. Since that time, demands have been sent to over thirty publishers for over 100 titles. By using and adapting existing software systems and by building new tools, the Library of Congress has been able to receive, process, and provide control to over 200 deliveries of issues of the vast majority of these titles, receiving multiple deliveries of distinct content for some of them. For the content received, the Library has been able to provide a required basic level of access for staff that are processing and managing the deliveries. Background The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world and an unparalleled world resource. The collection of nearly 142 million items includes more than 32 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 63 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; more than 5 million maps; 14 million print and photographs; 17 million microforms; 6 million pieces of sheet music; the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings; and a vast collection of incunabula, monographs and serials, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports, and other printed material. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland, is a part of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Founded in 1836, NLM is the world's largest biomedical library and the developer of electronic information services that deliver trillions of bytes of data to millions of users every day. NLM has nearly 12 million books, journals, manuscripts, audiovisuals, and other forms of medical information on its shelves. An important part of NLM's vast online holdings is PubMed Central, a web-based repository of biomedical journal literature providing free, unrestricted access to more than 1.5 million full-text articles. Goals The electronic serial content that the national libraries have received so far has had an extremely wide variety of packaging approaches, as was to be expected in content being provided by an equally wide variety of publishing organizations. The goal of the national libraries is to settle on a small number of standardized structural formats to maximize the ability for both institutions to preserve the digital content for current and future researchers. However, the variation in types of file format, file and directory structures and naming schemes, metadata and packaging of the deliveries received to date severely restricts the ability to achieve these preservation and access goals. In order to automate the receipt and processing of this content and move it to our standard formats, processes and normalization routines would need to be developed for each publisher and in some cases each title. Given the broad scope of the content which the national libraries wish to obtain, such a scenario is not scalable, and manually processing the receipt of content for potentially thousands of electronic serials cannot be sustained. The national libraries need digital content delivered in a small, manageable number of file formats, metadata formats and packaging conventions, preserving the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. Given that there are as yet insufficient agreed-upon - and widely implemented - standards for such data exchange within the publishing industry, the purpose of this RFI is to obtain information from interested parties, including the vendor community, about potential solutions to the problems facing the Library of Congress in receiving copyright mandatory deposits of electronic serials content in a small number of preferred digital formats. The goal is to gather information on existing capabilities in order to leverage those business processes and streams for the libraries' purposes; this is not a request to develop new capabilities for the national libraries. However, to the extent that new capabilities are under development and may be relevant to this request the libraries seek this information as well. Examples of the types of organizations that might provide such services include journal article aggregating services, abstracting and indexing services, and electronic journal archiving services. Products and Services The national libraries are looking to limit the streams of incoming electronic serial content to a small number of widely-adopted digital formats, in order to minimize customized processing on receipt, to facilitate digital preservation, and to enable efficient ingest into the libraries' respective digital repository and researcher-access systems. Therefore, we are interested in gathering information from organizations that currently: • receive electronic serial content - articles as well as front and back matter: tables of contents, article abstracts, lists of editorial boards, etc. - from publishers or other sources in a variety of formats and structures. Article files will include additional files such as figures, images, multimedia and supplemental data files. • have established procedures for performing additional functions such as handling article versioning, editing/updating/correcting content due to errata, determining when full content (files) is provided, ensuring that content is complete at the article level, the issue level and the journal level. • convert (normalize) that content into one or more standardized formats, preferably a structured XML container such as the Journal Archiving Tag Suite (JATS) from the NLM (soon to be standardized as NISO Z39.96). • parse and/or extract any accompanying metadata from the above content and likewise store it in a standard XML metadata structure. Examples of this metadata include journal title, ISSN, publisher, frequency of publication, issue and/or other part information (enumeration, chronology, etc.), article-level metadata including article title, author(s), subject/keyword terms, abstracts, tables of contents, etc. The national libraries are looking to streamline processing of incoming digital content for their collections, and are interested in gathering information from organizations that can: • Provide to the libraries the normalized content and metadata in either industry-standard packaging structures (file and directory naming, "zip", "tar" or other compression/packaging formats, etc.), or in formats prescribed by the libraries ("bag-it", etc.) • Provide the content via secure transfer methods (secure FTP, etc.) • Provide the content on a mutually-agreeable schedule, preferably an existing schedule for distribution of the content to other publishing partners. We ask organizations that can provide such services to describe their overall operation; the formats of the materials they receive; the format(s) to which they convert (normalize) the content; the approximate size of the operation - number of content sources (publishers, etc.) supported, number of titles/articles converted, number of distribution partners, etc.; methods (if any) for distribution of the normalized content, etc. (Respondents do not need to reveal any proprietary information about the details of their processes or software.) In addition to information about normalizing electronic journal content, we are interested in hearing from organizations that are already, or planning to, perform the above functions on other textual works besides electronic serials, such as electronic books. Business models The national libraries are interested in the economic sustainability of their digital acquisitions programs, and are interested in having organizations describe their current business models. That is, are the services provided on a for-profit or not-for-profit basis? Do the cost recovery structures lean more on the creators of the content, or the recipients? Are the services provided on a per title basis, a size basis (per megabyte/gigabyte, etc.), or some other model? Informational Meeting Day Approximately 30 days after the issuance of this RFI, the Library of Congress will be conducting an informational meeting at its headquarters in Washington D.C. The meeting is open to any interested vendor who has products or services that are in direct support of the expectations identified in this RFI. Space is limited to 40 people and pre-registration is required. Vendors will be allowed no more than (3) three representatives for the entire company. Individual divisions of a company are considered a single parent company. It is recommended that at least (1) one of the participants be a senior-level strategist and (1) from the vendors' technical division. Video conferencing will be available. All wishing to attend Information Day [in person or by video conference] must pre-register by providing the names of attendees and indication of interest via e-mail to (procurement officer email contact info?) with the subject heading "Normalized Electronic Serial Content" no later than one week prior to the event. The session will be open only to those who have pre-registered. NOTE: Accessibility for persons with a disability is provided, but must be noted in the pre-registration e-mail. Please include the type of accommodation required in the e-mail. Vendors are also encouraged to submit questions about the project prior to Information Day. These questions will be addressed by Library of Congress personnel at Information Day. All questions must be submitted in writing via e-mail to (procurement officer email contact info?) with the subject heading "Normalized Electronic Serial Content" no later than 5:00pm, Eastern Time on April 3, 2012 This is a Request for Information Only. This announcement is a request for information only and does not obligate the Library of Congress or the National Library of Medicine in any way. This is not a request for proposal and the Library of Congress will not pay for any information submitted or for any expenses associated with providing information. Any information submitted by respondents to this RFI is strictly voluntary. Material submitted will be deemed proprietary to the extent permitted by applicable laws and regulations if so marked by the respondent.
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