< projects - papers - specs -presentations - brief bio - various >

Born Herbert Van de Sompel on March 20th 1957 in Ghent, Belgium. Europe, that is. I spent the first 5 years of my life there. Then, I followed my parents to Arnsberg, Germany, where we stayed until I was 11. Quite a great time that was. Back in Ghent, I went to a local high school, until I was ready to go to Ghent University. There, I got myself a masters in Mathematics (1979) and later a masters in computer science (1981). Well, computers nor computer science were what they are today, really.

I took on the position of head of library automation at Ghent University (1981). My thesis for computer science had been the analysis of an interlibrary loan problem and the programmation of a solution. That's why. The solution was programmed in a Pascal-like language on a Digital PDP-11/34. Funny thing is that machine and application were only put to sleep a couple of days before Y2K. For many years, the library automation department of Ghent University was me myself and I. But over the course of 17 years, I was able to build a world-class team and hence a world-class library automation environment. Working in the library, the information virus really caught me. I found myself thinking increasingly about access to digital information, equity of access, ...

In 1998, I felt I needed a break. Motivated by some strong supporters of my work and thinking, I applied for a special grant with the Belgian Science Foundation that would allow me to take a leave for a year and do research to get a PhD. I received the grant and what followed was quite an unforgettable year, of which I spent 6 months at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. My stay there was supported by a travel grant from the Council On Library and Information Resources. During this sabbatical, I worked simultaneously on two topics. One was context-sensitive and dynamic linking of scholarly information resources. This work became the topic of my Ph.D. thesis, which I defended on June 9th 2000 at Ghent University. I was proud to count two reknown digital library gurus -- William Y. Arms and Clifford Lynch -- on my committee. This work also led to the commercialization of the SFX software that was created during my research, to the process of standardizing OpenURL with NISO, and to the emerging adoption of open linking in the scholarly information industry. The other work was related to preprints. I feel strong about the role that preprints can play in the transformation of scholarly communication. That is why I started the Open Archives Initiative with Paul Ginsparg and Rick Luce in 1999. Although the Initiative has reformulated its mission statement in 2000, its Metadata Harvesting specification will be an important tool in working towards interoperability of preprint archives.

In 2000/2001, I was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of Cornell University. I was part of the Digital Library Research Group, and had the exciting opportuntiy to work closely with Carl Lagoze and William Y. Arms. I also taught Computing Methods for Digital Libraries in the Spring of 2001. Then I moved to London, UK, where I became the first Director of e-Strategy and Programmes at The British Library. That didn't work out <understatement>too well</understatement>, and in March 2002 I crossed the Atlantic again, to take on a position as Digital Library Researcher at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. I don't find words to express how happy I am to be back at the Lab, and to be able to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Major Projects

These are the major projects I am currently involved in:

• The aDORe repository effort: a distributed, modular, standards-based architecture for hosting and accessing compound digital objects (partly funded by the Library of Congress NDIIP).
• MESUR: a quest for quality indicators for scholarly objects based on their usage, to complement citation-based indicators (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).
• OAI-ORE: Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE), a new effort of the Open Archives Initiative develops specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).
• Pathways: Looking at scholarly communication as a global, cross-repository workflow (funded by NSF IIS-0430906).
• NENO: a semantic network programming language.

Some papers

• Van de Sompel, Herbert and Patrick Hochstenbach.Reference Linking in a Hybrid Libary Environment, Part 1: Frameworks for Linking. 1999. D-Lib Magazine.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert and Patrick Hochstenbach. Reference Linking in a Hybrid Libary Environment, Part 2: SFX, a Generic Linking Solution. 1999. D-Lib Magazine.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert and Patrick Hochstenbach.Reference Linking in a Hybrid Libary Environment, Part 3: Generalizing the SFX solution in the "SFX@Ghent & SFX@LANL" experiment. 1999. D-Lib Magazine.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, Thomas Krichel, Michael L. Nelson, Patrick Hochstenbach, Victor M. Lyapunov, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Mohamed Kholief, Xiaoming Liu, and Heath O'Connell.The UPS Prototype: An Experimental End-User Service across E-Print Archives. 2000. D-Lib Magazine.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, and Carl Lagoze. The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative. 2000. D-Lib Magazine.
• Lagoze, Carl and Van de Sompel, Herbert. The Open Archives Initiative: Building a low-barrier interoperability framework . 2001. Draft of accepted submission to JCDL2001.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert and Beit-Arie, Oren. Open Linking in the Scholarly Information Environment Using the OpenURL Framework. 2001. D-Lib Magazine.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert and Beit-Arie, Oren. Generalizing the OpenURL Framework beyond References to Scholarly Works: the Bison-Futé model. 2001. D-Lib Magazine.
• Beit-Arie, Oren, Miriam Blake, Priscilla Caplan, Dale Flecker, Tim Ingoldsby, Laurence W. Lannom, William H.Mischo, Edward Pentz, Sally Rogers, Herbert Van de Sompel. Linking to the Appropriate Copy: Report of a DOI-Based Prototype. 2001. D-Lib Magazine.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert and Lagoze, Carl. 2002. Notes from the Interoperability Front: A Progress Report from the Open Archives Initiative. Draft of accepted submission to ECDL 2002.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert and Donna Bergmark. 2002. A distributed registry for OpenURL metadata schemas with an OAI-PMH conformant central repository. Draft of accepted submission to DCADL (ICPP02).
• Lagoze, Carl and Van de Sompel, Herbert. The making of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. 2003. Draft of accepted submission to special issue of Library Hi Tech (2003, Volume 21, Number 2, Pages 118-128, doi:10.1108/07378830310479776) on the OAI-PMH.
• Hochstenbach, Patrick, Henry Jerez and Herbert Van de Sompel. The OAI-PMH Static Repository and Static Repository Gateway. 2003. Draft of an accepted submission to JCDL 2003.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, Jeff Young and Thom Hickey. Using the OAI-PMH ... Differently. 2003. D-Lib Magazine.
• Bekaert, Jeroen, Patrick Hochstenbach and Herbert Van de Sompel. Using MPEG-21 DIDL to Represent Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library. 2003. D-Lib Magazine.
• Bekaert, Jeroen, Patrick Hochstenbach, Lyudmila Balakireva and Herbert Van de Sompel.Using MPEG-21 and NISO OpenURL for the Dynamic Dissemination of Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library. 2004. D-Lib Magazine.
• Jerez, Henry, Xiaoming Liu, Patrick Hochstenbach, and Herbert Van de Sompel. The multi-faceted use of the OAI-PMH in the LANL Repository. 2004. Draft of an accepted submission to JCDL 2004.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, Sandy Payette, John Ericksson, Carl Lagoze, and Simeon Warner. Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve. 2004. D-Lib Magazine.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, Michael L. Nelson, Carl Lagoze, Simeon Warner. Resource Harvesting within the OAI-PMH Framework. 2004. D-Lib Magazine.
• Bekaert, Jeroen, Xiaoming Liu, and Herbert Van de Sompel. aDORe: a modular and standards-based digital object repository at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 2005. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Denver, June 2005. doi:10.1145/1065385.1065470. Also published in: IEEE TCDL Bulletin, 2005, Volume 2, Issue 1.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, Jeroen Bekaert, Xiaoming Liu, Lyudmila Balakireva, Thorsten Schwander. aDORe: a modular, standards-based Digital Object Repository. 2005. The Computer Journal. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0502028 . Computer Journal paper at doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxh114
• Bollen, Johan, Herbert Van de Sompel, Joan Smith, Rick Luce. Towards alternative metrics of journal impact: a comparison of dowload and citation data. 2005. Information Processing & Management. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0503007. Information Processing & Management paper at doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2005.03.024
• Liu, Xiaoming, Johan Bollen, Michael Nelson, Herbert Van de Sompel. Co-Authorship Networks in the Digital Library Research Community. 2005. Information Processing & Management. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0502056. Information Processing & Management paper at doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2005.03.012
• Liu, Xiaoming, Lyudmila Balakireva, Herbert Van de Sompel. File-based storage of Digital Objects and constituent datastreams: XMLtapes and Internet Archive ARC files. arXiv:cs.DL/0503016. 2005. Draft of accepted submission to ECDL 2005. ECDL 2005 paper in Lecture Notes in Computer Science at doi:10.1007/11551362_23
• Nelson, Michael, Herbert Van de Sompel, Xiaoming Liu, Terry Harrison, Nathan McFarland. mod_oai: An Apache Module for Metadata Harvesting. 2005. arXiv:cs.DL/0503069. Draft of submission to ECDL 2005. ECDL 2005 poster in Lecture Notes in Computer Science at doi:10.1007/11551362_58
• Bekaert, Jeroen, and Herbert Van de Sompel. A Standards-based Solution for the Accurate Transfer of Digital Assets. 2005. D-Lib Magazine.
• Bekaert, Jeroen, and Herbert Van de Sompel. Representing Digital Assets using MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration. 2005. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0508065 . International Journal on Digital Libraries paper at doi:10.1007/s00799-005-0133-0.
• Rodriguez, Marko, Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel. The convergence of Digital Libraries and the Peer-Review Process. 2005. In: Journal of Information Science, volume 32, number 2, pp. 149-159. doi:10.1177/0165551506062327. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0504084.
• Bekaert, Jeroen, Xiaoming Liu, and Herbert Van de Sompel. Representing Digital Assets for Long-Term Preservation using MPEG-21 DID. 2005. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0509084 . Draft of an accepted submission for PV 2005 "Ensuring Long-term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and Technical data".
• Bekaert, Jeroen, and Herbert Van de Sompel. Access Interfaces for Open Archival Information Systems based on the OAI-PMH and the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services. 2005. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0509090 . Draft of an accepted submission for PV 2005 "Ensuring Long-term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and Technical data".
• Bollen, Johan, Marko Rodriguez and Herbert Van de Sompel. Mapping the structure of science through usage. 2006 . In: Scientometrics, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 669-687. doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0151-8. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0601030.
• Rodriguez, Marko, Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel. An analysis of the bid behavior of the 2005 JCDL program committee (poster). 2006. In: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 2006, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. doi:10.1145/1141753.1141847. Winner of Best Poster Award. Also published in: IEEE TCDL Bulletin, 2007, Volume 3, Issue 2.
• Bollen, Johan and Herbert Van de Sompel. An architecture for the aggregation and analysis of
  scholarly usage data. 2006. In: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 2006, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. doi:10.1145/1141753.1141821.
• Bekaert, Jeroen, Xiaoming Liu, Herbert Van de Sompel, Sany Payette, Carl Lagoze, and Simeon Warner. Pathways Core: A Content Model for Cross-Repository Services (poster). 2006. In: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 2006, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. doi:10.1145/1141753.1141863. Also published in: IEEE TCDL Bulletin, 2007, Volume 3, Issue 2.
• Bekaert, Jeroen. Standards-based interfaces for Harvesting and Obtaining assets from Digital Repositories. PhD Thesis, Ghent University, April 25th 2006. PhD Advisors: Mil De Kooning and Herbert Van de Sompel
• Van de Sompel, Herbert. Certification in a Digital Era. June 5 2006. Nature. Web Focus on Peer-Review.
• Nelson, Michael L., Joan A. Smith, Ignacio Garcia del Campo, Herbert Van de Sompel and Xiaoming Liu. 2006. Efficient, Automatic Web Resource Harvesting. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2006), November 10, 2006, Arlington, Virginia, USA.
• Bollen, Johan and Herbert Van de Sompel. Mapping the structure of science through usage. 2006. Scientometrics, vol. 69, no. 2, pp 227-258. doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0151-8
• Warner, Simoen, Jeroen Bekaert, Carl Lagoze, Xiaoming Liu, Sandy Payette, and Herbert Van de Sompel. 2006. Pathways: Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories. Accepted submission to the special issue on eScience of the International Journal on Digital Libraries. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0610031.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, Carl Lagoze, Jeroen Bekaert, Xiaoming Liu, Sandy Payette, and Simeon Warner. 2006. An interoperable fabric for scholarly value chains. D-Lib Magazine, vol. 12 no. 10. doi:10.1045/october2006-vandesompel.
• Bollen, Johan and Herbert Van de Sompel. Usage Impact Factor: the effects of sample characteristics on usage-based impact metrics. 2006. Accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Preprint at arXiv:cs.DL/0610154.
• Rodriguez, Marko, Johan Bollen, and Herbert Van de Sompel. Mapping the bid behavior of conference referees. Journal of Informatrics, 1(2007), pp 68-82. doi:10.1016/j.joi.2006.09.006
• Dellavalle, Rober P, Lisa M Schilling, Marko A Rodriguez, Herbert Van de Sompel, and Johan Bollen. Refining Dermatology Journal Impact Factors Using PageRank. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, In Press 2007.
• Bollen, Johan, Marko Rodriguez, Herbert Van de Sompel, Lyudmilla Balakireva, and Aric Hagberg. The Largest Scholarly Semantic Network...Ever (poster). In: Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web conference, May 2007. Winner of Best Poster Award.
• Bollen, Johan, Marko A. Rodriguez and Herbert Van de Sompel. MESUR: usage-based metrics of scholarly impact (poster). In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Vancouver, June 2007. doi:10.1145/1255175.1255273. Winner of Best Poster Award.
• Rodriguez, Marko, Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel. A Practical Ontology for the Large-Scale Modeling of Scholarly Artifacts and their Usage. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Vancouver, June 2007. doi:10.1145/1255175.1255229.
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, and Carl Lagoze. 2007. Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication. CyberTechnology Quarterly: The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure, Volume 3, Number 3 (2007).
• Van de Sompel, Herbert, Ryan Chute, and Patrick Hochstenbach. 2008. The aDORe Federation Architecture. Preprint at arXiv:0803.4511v1
• Bollen, Johan, Herbert Van de Sompel, and Marko Rodriguez. 2008. Towards Usage-Based Impact Metrics: First Results from the MESUR Project. Draft of accepted submission for JCDL 2008 at arXiv:0804.3791v1.

Specs

• The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications. Editors: Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van de Sompel, Pete Johnston, Michael Nelson, Robert Sanderson, Simeon Warner. 2008.
• ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004: The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services. NISO Committee AX. 2005.
• Conveying rights expressions about metadata in the OAI-PMH framework. Editors: Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael Nelson, Simeon Warner. 2004.
• The "info" URI Scheme for Information Assets with Identifiers in Public Namespaces. RFC 4452. Herbert Van de Sompel, Tony Hammond, Eamonn Neylon, Stuart L. Weibel. 2006.
• Specification for an OAI Static Repository and an OAI Static Repository Gateway. Editors: Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael Nelson, Simeon Warner, Patrick Hochstenbach, Henry Jerez. 2003.
• The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, v.2.0. Editors: Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael Nelson, Simeon Warner. 2002.
• The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, v.1.1. Editors: Herbert Van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze. 2001.
• The Santa Fe Convention for the Open Archives Initiative. Editors: Herbert Van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze. 2000.
• The OpenURL, v.0.1. Editors: Herbert Van de Sompel, Patrick Hochstenbach and Oren Beit-Arie. 2000.

Brief bio

Herbert Van de Sompel graduated in Mathematics and Computer Science at Ghent University, and in 2000, obtained a Ph.D. there. For many years, he was Head of Library Automation at Ghent University. After having left Ghent in 2000, he has been Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Cornell University, and Director of e-Strategy and Programmes at the British Library. Currently, he is the team leader of the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Team does research regarding various aspects of scholarly communication in the digital age, including information infrastructure, interoperability, digital preservation and indicators for the assessment of the quality of units of scholarly communication. Herbert has played a major role in creating the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, the SFX linking server, and the info URI.

Some Presentations

• The interoperable grid for scholarly communication: on scholarly communication and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Closing Keynote at the CNI Fall 2000 Task Force Meeting, San Antonio, TX.
• The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: an Update. Presentation at the CNI Fall 2002 Task Force Meeting, Washington DC.
• Systems for Scholarly Communication & the OAI-PMH. Lecture at the Frye Leadership Institute, Emory University, Atlanta GA. June 11th 2002.
• The OAI-PMH and the OpenURL: original motivation, direction, future. Keynote at DCMI 2002, Florence, Italy, October 14th 2002.
• The OAI and a disaggregated system for Scholarly Communication. Keynote at the "Open Archives for Research" seminar, Ghent University, Belgium, October 15th 2002.
• The OAI-PMH and the future direction of the OAI. Keynote at the 2nd Workshop on the OAI, CERN, Geneva, October 17th 2002.
• Perspectives on Scholarly Communication. Keynote at the Ethical Forum on Scholarly Communication, University Foundation, Brussels, Belgium, October 20th 2002
• Motivation, inspiration and innovation from frustration. Keynote at the VALA 2004 Conference, Melbourne, Australia, February 4th 2004
• Untitled I: challenges ahead. Keynote at the Olybris 2005 Ex Libris Seminar, Kos, Greece, April 18th 2005.
• OpenURL Tutorial at the Olybris 2005 Ex Libris Seminar, Kos, Greece, April 18th 2005.
• OAI-PMH Tutorial (Part 1 and Part 2) at the Olybris 2005 Ex Libris Seminar, Kos, Greece, April 18th 2005.
• File-based storage of Digital Objects and constituent datastreams: XMLtapes and Internet Archive ARC files. Paper presentation at ECDL 2005, Vienna, Austria, September 20th 2005
• Thoughts on Persistent Resolution. Presentation at the DLF Spring Forum 2006, Austin, Texas, April 11th 2006.
• The aDORe effort: Insights regarding repository federation. Presentation at the NISO workshop "Managing Electronic Collections", Denver, Colorado, September 29th 2006.
• OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange. Presentation at the OAI5 Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications, CERN, Geneva, Switserland, April 18th 2007.
• The MESUR Project: In Search of Usage-Based Metrics of Scholarly Impact. Presentation at UKSG 2008, Torquay, UK, April 8th 2008.
• The OAI Object Reuse & Exchange Interoperability Framework. Presentation at UKSG 2008, Torquay, UK, April 8th 2008.

Various

• LITA/OCLC Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology for 2003. See LITA announcement.
• UKOLUG Tony Kent Strix Award 2003. See UKOLOG announcement.
• Interview in OCLC Newsletter, July 2003.
• Interview in The Charleston Advisor, April 2003.
• Charleston Advisor Five Star Award for an Individual, October 2004.
• Los Alamos National Laboratory 2004 Distinguished Performance Award, July 2005.
• ANSI Meritorious Service Award 2005, August 2005.
• LACASIS Contributions to Information Science and Technology Award 2005, December 2005.
• News item in Nature about our Journal Status paper, February 2006.
• SPARC Innovator award, April 2006.