Drs. Laurents Sesink

Age: 47
Interview: 31.10.2012

Profile

Laurents Sesink is head of ICT services and infrastructure at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. He studied history and historical information science; his current field of activity is the management of the networked services of the data archive. In the last few years Laurents has worked on Persistent Object and Author Identifiers, Accreditation of trusted digital repositories, Data management plans and policy, Cost modeling of research data management, Research data archiving systems, Social media apps, Preservation strategies, Enhanced publications.

View on enhanced publications

Benefits of digital publications

Sesink has a strong preference for digital publications because of the extra options, such as scrolling, searching, linking to other online information and the ease of including images, (interactive) graphs, sound and animations (see also Veteran Tapes: http://vimeo.com/14770917). Only when it comes to close reading and studying a text he may print the publication.

Databases and enhanced publications

Digital publications allow access to the data used in the corresponding research, either in the form of hyperlinked attachments or through a database interface embedded in the publication itself. This could have the form of an (interactive) graph, a query facility or video. An embedded interface is much more convenient for the user than indirect access (which requires downloading and installing a database), however, it is currently still a challenge for data archives. Their infrastructure is not yet ready for such advanced forms of enhancement. They should collaborate with publishers of scientific journals: the publishing houses have already an infrastructure for digital publications and data archives have the same of research data; the missing link are visualization components, directly driven by the data stored in the repository.

See also:

· E. Smits & J. van der Plicht, ‘Mesolithic and Neolithic human remains in the Netherlands: physical anthropological and stable isotope investigations’, Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries 1-1 (May 2009)

· Images of archaeological excavation: Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries

Scholarly data and service providers

Advanced access to data implies, that they are made accessible to machines as well. This requires a middle layer based on standards, which are still largely to be developed. Currently, data archives are more focused on sharing data, rather than on the direct reuse.

Direct data access will open new perspectives for various service providers, also outside the academic world, like travel  agencies, schools and news media. It will also create new business models that are ultimately based on scholarly data.

See also: Nederland van boven.

Trust and durability

Points of concern are the trust and durability. Information about the origin and the creators of enhancements  is often missing, which may undermine the reliability. Moreover, the drawback of more complex enhancements is that their durability cannot be guaranteed. The idea of a life cycle seems to be inescapable: the publication’s core must be kept accessible forever, but we may have to accept that some enhancements cannot be supported in a rich format over a longer period of time. This could be acceptable provided a fallback strategy is implemented: when the enhancement is no longer displayed in its original rich form, it must be still available in simpler version, for example as plain text.

For example, searching for images of Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting, The Girl With The Pearl Earring (1665) through Google raises several problems:  which image is authentic, how to find the source of the information and how can you be sure that a link to that image will still exist over one year?

Top priorities

His priorities regarding enhancement pertain to the (visual) display of the context of items mentioned in the text, in terms of place, time and persons: showing where something happened, in what time frame, what the context of a person is, what patterns can be observed and what changes has occurred over time. The same goes for detailed searching along these dimensions.

Some notes:

· Geographic illustrations still require a lot of effort from the researcher. They are mostly based on current 2D-geographic information systems, which are less powerful  than 3D visualizations in illustrating complex phenomena as, for example, earthquakes.

· Semantic web technologies are important to implement this connectivity, however, nowadays this technique is available only in a rather raw state. Usability research and interaction design are needed to make their deployment more user friendly and adequate. Much work remains to be done on vocabularies, particularly for the humanities studies.

Audio fragments

· Benefits of digital publications (1:28)

· Databases and enhanced publications (3:06)

· Reuse of scholarly data by service providers (6:52)

· Trust (2:05)

· Durability and lifecycle (1:42)

· Top priorities (3:28)