May 07, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, Metadata
, OCLC
Here are links to several unrelated publications .....
Reconfiguring the Library Systems Environment
portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2008.
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2008/dempsey-portal.pdf (.pdf: 195K/18 pp.)
[Lorcan Dempsey: Selected publications [OCLC]]
This is a short piece adapted from an earlier blog entry.
Lavoie, Brian, and Günter Waibel. An Art Resource in New York: The Collective Collection of the NYARC Art Museum Libraries. (.pdf: 136K/18 pp.)
[Books and reports [OCLC - Publications]]
The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) includes the Frick Art Reference Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. This report describes the results of a study of the aggregate collection of these institutions.
Godby, Carol Jean, Devon Smith, and Eric R. Childress. 2008. "Toward Element-level Interoperability in Bibliographic Metadata." The Code4Lib Journal, 2 (2008-03-24). Available online at: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/54.
[Publications [OCLC - OCLC Research]]
I mentioned this before, but in a message about another topic.
April 21, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
I spoke at the JISC conference in Birmingham last week. It was at a session related to the JISC's Libraries of the Future initiative. A special supplement on academic libraries is appearing in the Guardian Newspaper to accompany the initiative. A range of topics is covered; the treatment is high level and journalistic, as you would expect. This is a nice achievement by JISC, as it puts a range of positive stories about libraries in front of the University community (where, in a note to non-UK readers, the Guardian has high penetration). Via eFoundations:
Material from the supplement, covering information literacy, physical learning spaces, Library 2.0, business models, digitisation, users and librarians is already available on the Guardian Web site. [eFoundations: Libraries of the future]
jiscconference08
April 07, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, OCLC
Jeremy Frumkin of Oregon State University talks to Merrilee Proffitt about library services and moving to the network level in the second Parcast [file is here]. This is in response to the question "what keeps you awake at night?".
What is a Parcast?
Welcome to the OCLC Programs and Research PARcast page. Here you'll find links to our podcasts—the latest recorded interviews with industry thought leaders and up-and-comers—as well as recorded webinars, or online presentations, from Programs and Research staff. [PARcasts [OCLC - Programs and Research]]
Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress spoke to Merrilee in the first Parcast. His topic:
Special collections need to keep collecting and building collections of real things, but also need to be smart and be part of the digital conversation. How do libraries create a digital environment where researchers can derive the evidence they need to do their work? [PARcasts [OCLC - Programs and Research]]
March 23, 2008
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Categories:
GLAM
, Libraries - organization and services
, Metadata
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, The cultural and scholarly record
An interesting announcement from CLIR about a $4.27M competitive program to describe hidden collections has just appeared. The existence of such collections must be more fully disclosed if they are to release more of their value in research and learning:
With generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources is creating a national program to identify and catalog hidden special collections and archives. The records and descriptions obtained through this effort will be accessible through the Internet and the Web, enabling the federation of disparate, local cataloging entries with tools to aggregate this information by topic and theme. [Hidden Collections]
This is a preliminary announcement and it will be interesting to see how the thinking behind the program is elaborated as more materials appear. The call for proposals will be in June. In particular, I will be interested to see some of the observations about organization, formats and federation frameworks expanded. See for example the following statements which relate to each of these topics respectively:
The program's strategy for building a distributed organization of cataloging and collection information assumes local autonomy and responsibility but also requires centralized agreements concerning governing principles that will ensure enterprise-wide coherence. [Hidden Collections]
Because tightly defined fields can impede interoperability, recent reports on hidden collections emphasize the need to make the categories and schemes of record creation and descriptions less rigid than those of the past. Cataloging special collections and archival materials has routinely been defined as a local practice. The shift to understanding hidden collections as a national problem entails an acknowledgment that in the 21st century, collaboration, coordination, and coherence of response to users is fundamental and takes precedence over local practice. [Hidden Collections]
The process will involve adopting a technology platform (or platforms) that will allow accurate descriptive information to be entered quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. The results of each project will be linked to and interoperable with those of all others to form a federated environment that can be built upon over time. Institutions must acknowledge local ownership of the data generated through the program and agree to its persistence. [Hidden Collections]
March 18, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
The Library at University College Dublin (UCD) invited expressions of interest in a "website and online environment consultancy" a while ago. I thought that the document they prepared as background was nicely done, and that although specific in many ways to UCD it represented a general statement of common issues being addressed by libraries as they grapple with what constitutes an effective web presence.
Reading the document two general questions came through for me (expressed in my words): - How does one create some unity of approach across the resources to be presented, in terms both of management and presentation? Some of this discussion is about whether it makes sense to move away from a web-page list/browse presentation to a more managed environment for particular resources. Examples would be moving all electronic resources into Metalib or using LibGuides for library subject guides. I was struck by this comment about the catalogue:
We have taken it for granted that the catalogue as a separate search interface can happily retain a different look and feel from the website and other interfaces but many of our users do not differentiate the online library platforms in this way [UCD Library Web Consultancy]. They point to the use of Collexis by the Technical University of Delft to provide search based access to information about the library and its services, and wonder if this approach is preferable to the more common static web page approach.
- The second question is in some ways more interesting, and more difficult. The document notes that the university has several network environments (course management system, University portal), and this raises questions about the best target environment for library attention. In which environment should services be delivered?
There is also some consideration of general Web 2.0 considerations, although I liked that they resisted the temptation to lead with this.
They ask this question:
Is there a case for our online presence in effect becoming "the library" and the physical library actually becoming a sort of support or adjunct? Our thinking to date has not moved beyond viewing the online environment as an important, but subordinate component and our entire structure reflects that perspective. [UCD Library Web Consultancy]
Until recently, library place, expertise, and services were vertically integrated around collections. Space was needed to house collections and allow readers and writers to consult with collections. Expertise organized and interpreted them. Services provided access to them. However this is all reconfigured in a network environment where readers and writers have many resources to call on. In this context, place, expertise, collections and services continue to co-evolve but are not so closely integrated in the same way and need to be managed to different ends. So, for example there may be more emphasis on social learning, on high value face to face interaction, on access to scarce equipment or expertise in the context of place. Or, again, library network services will look more to placing expertise or collections at the point of need in research and learning workflows, and at managing institutional outputs.
Thanks to Ros Pan for the link.
Related entries:
March 16, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Learning and research - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
And speaking of Elsevier, several colleagues and I received an email invitation from "the Scopus team" to look at our h-index [Wikipedia entry] on our very own Scopus profile page. Here is some of the text from the invitation:
The h-index * can help you evaluate and benchmark your research output and that of your peers. It provides an indication of the quality and the consistency of the researcher's work by looking at the number of articles published and the number of citations received over time. In Scopus the h-index presents a metric that takes all of an author's articles published between 1996 to present into account and thus provides a transparent mean to evaluate the impact of an author in the most recent 12 years. You will also find quick links to your publications, citation counts and co-authors.
I am sure that this has gone to many readers of this blog also.
A very superficial examination shows that Scopus provides some useful approaches for merging and demerging result sets based on knowledge provided by the searcher. It pulls together a lot of contextual data in its profiles, based on mining of article details. I found it useful. I have not looked at Web of Knowledge recently so I do not know how it compares.
Four overlapping things struck me about this invitation and the service:
- Reputation management. The direct appeal in the invitation is to the author's interest in his or her research impact or reputation. Reputation management is of growing interest, for individuals and for institutions. I think that this creates an interesting intersection between research support/administration services and library/information services around such things as the relationship between institutional repositories and the recording of faculty publications, consistent naming of authors and institutions so as not to fragment impact through incorrect pulling together of publications, faculty expertise databases, citation management, and so on. The interaction between personal disclosure (what I put on my website, or social networking sites, or ...), institutional management, and third party data aggregation/manipulation will also be interesting to watch.
- Making data work harder. The SCOPUS profiles are based on extensive mining and manipulation of data to create the context on their pages (affiliations, citations, cited by, h-index, etc). Increasingly, in many cases, we will expect to see such further analysis to create context and depth. Think of what we see in a Google Book Search page, an Amazon results page, a Worldcat Identities page.
- Socialising Knowledge networks. The academic literature and the tools we have created to organize it reveal networks of knowledge. Citations, subject indexing, cross-reference structures, and so on, create connections between people, documents, ideas, institutions. Increasingly, we can mobilize these connections in digital environments, and make other connections. Alongside these 'classical' networks, we are seeing newer social networks emerge. One of the more interesting developments we will see will be the integration of our classically created networks and these new social networks. I was interested to see for example discussions around user-driven name disambiguation at Crossref. SCOPUS offers you the opportunity to submit feedback on a profile: presumably this will develop over time to allow greater interaction between those doing the profiling, based on available data, and those profiled, based on their knowledge.
- We know where you live. Related to the last point, I was interested, and quite impressed, that they could send me an email pointing me to my profile page and that it all worked out. I do not have a very common name; I wonder what criteria they had in place before they would send you an email, and how many of them went astray. It is also interesting to see a publisher of a bibliographic tool reach out to users/authors in this way, with an incentive for them to get interested in a particular product. It potentially creates an interesting dynamic for the library.
Related entries:
March 09, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, Standards
, User experience
OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) has released a nice white paper which discusses issues in providing an end-user access environment for its shared resources, and more interestingly, how that environment engages with the behaviors and expectations of its academic users. This document (pdf) was created to highlight opportunities and drive discussion for the OCUL consortium in both the short term through the launch of a new Scholars Portal server in 2008, and in the long term by incorporating more 'social' means of sharing and organizing information within OCUL's Scholars Portal and the larger academic community that it serves. [Scholr 2.0]
There is a pdf version and a commentpress version with the benefit of reader comments.
As one might expect from a discussion white paper, there is a focus on questions and potential directions. Recommendations are given in several areas:
Enhance and improve the user interface
• Enrich Scholars Portal content by bringing in metadata from sources outside the journal repository
• Explore the implementation of controlled vocabulary, thesauri and authority control
• Add user tagging functionality [Scholr 2.0]
Connect the citation network to user workflow
• Provide table of contents (TOC) RSS feeds with links that facilitate authentication. If it is possible, allow users to generate their own RSS feeds.
• Provide users of scholarly resources with social bookmarking services
• Consider services that support the whole of the user’s research process and the development of online space for OCUL research communities.
• Seek means for Scholars Portal to be integrated into Learning Management Systems used by OCUL [Scholr 2.0]
Embrace standards and technologies that will allow present and future network discovery systems to make use of what we offer
• Provide both permalinks as well as COinS OpenURLs in the Scholars Portal server and to encourage OCUL libraries to adopt their own versions of LibX or promote other COinS readers
• Investigate how to take advantage of the attribute-based information that Shibboleth can provide
• Consider what semantic metadata could be provided through Scholars Portal [Scholr 2.0]
It usefully brings together a range of material. Worth a read.
March 02, 2008
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Categories:
Featured
, General - distributed environments
, Libraries - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Social networking
I find Web 2.0 increasingly confusing as a label; no surprise there. This is not just because of its essential vagueness, but because I think it tends to be used in a couple of very different ways. Where this happens there is bound to be some confusion. Schematically, I will use the labels 'diffusion' and 'concentration' for these two ways.
diffusion is probably the more dominant of the two. Here it covers a range of tools and techniques which create richer connectivity between people, applications and data; which support writers as well as readers; which provide richer presentation environments. What tends to get discussed here are blogs and wikis; RSS; social networking; crowdsourcing of content; websites made programmable through web services and simple APIs; simple service composition environments; Ajax, flex, silverlight; and so on.
concentration is a major characteristic of our network experience, which often involves major gravitational hubs (google, amazon, flickr, facebook, propertyfinder.com). These concentrate data, users (as providers and consumers), and communications and computational capacity. They build value by collaboratively sourcing the creation of powerful data assets with their users. The value grows with the reinforcing property of network effects: the more people who participate, the more valuable they become. And opening up these platforms through web services creates more network effects. These sites also mobilize usage data to reflexively adapt their services, to better target particular users or to identify design directions. Of course, these platforms are very closely controlled, and there is an interesting balance of interests between openness and control at various levels in how they manage resources (see for example my discussion of the Amazon and Google APIs).
Interestingly, if you trace Tim O'Reilly's writings on Web 2.0 since the publication of his major defining article you see an emphasis on what I have called 'concentration' come through. (See my note on an interview with Tim O'Reilly by David Weinberger, on which I draw above, and also see O'Reilly blog posts here and here.)
Now, of course 'concentration' and 'diffusion' are often complementary approaches. The major Internet hubs 'diffuse' their benefits through service and data syndication, apis, participation, etc, but their value often derives from successfully driving network effects through wide participation and consolidation of data. In fact, many of the 'diffusion' techniques work best when associated with concentrating applications. Think of tagging for example. People have incentives to tag their resources in Flickr or Librarything in ways that may not obtain in the library catalog. Scale matters in the context of the social value created in these services (of course, in these examples, folks are also tagging their own resources). You cannot simply add social networking to a site and expect it to work well. Think of all those empty forums.
Much of the library discussion of Web 2.0 is about 'diffusion', about a set of techniques for richer interaction. It is appropriate that libraries should offer an experience that is continuous with how people experience the web.
However, there is a very important way in which the library experience is not continuous with the web. It remains fragmented: it does not have the characteristics of the concentrating, gravitational hubs which characterize so much web use, and are so much a part of O'Reilly's Web 2.0. Fragmented by database boundary, by service boundary (e.g. connecting a discovery experience gracefully to a fulfillment experience through resolution), by library boundary. We are now familiar with the comparison between this fragmented experience and discovery on the web. And we are also familiar with discussion of how the library presence is weakly represented in the major network presences.
However, think also of the library management environment. Think for example of places where data needs to be concentrated to create value: aggregating user data across sites (e.g. counter data), or aggregating user created data (tags, reviews), or aggregating transactions (e.g. circulations, resolver clickthroughs). Motivations here are to drive business intelligence which allows services to be refined (e.g. how does my database usage compare to that of my peer group), to develop targeted services (people who like this, also liked that), to improve local services (e.g. add tags or reviews). These are examples where scale matters, where data may need to be concentrated above the individual library level.
And, we are seeing for fee services emerge which address this need. LibraryThing, for example, syndicates its user-generated tagging to libraries. I am not sure that ScholarlyStats provides a service which compares usage across libraries; it would be interesting to know if there were demand for such a thing.
This then touches on larger questions about sourcing decisions (in what combination of local, collaborative, and third party do libraries acquire their service capacities) and about concentration of library presence (in what combination of library or library and third party are services offered).
For example, I discussed Georgia Pines and OhioLink the other day as examples of groups of libraries collaboratively sourcing a concentrated library presence which increases their gravitational pull.
And libraries are beginning to think more seriously about sourcing services with central web presences. Think for example of the decisions made by the National Library of Australia and the Library of Congress when they chose to use Flickr for significant image projects. NLA is seeking to expand the coverage of PictureAustralia; LC is seeking to collect tags from viewers. In each case, the library wants to benefit from the concentration of users and data that Flickr has created on the web. And to suggest another example, Andy Powell has been raising some intriguing questions about how repository services should be sourced in ways that, again, map onto peoples' experience of the web: would a consolidated network level service be more motivating than a serious of institutional presences? (see here and here). Social networking or other services, he suggests, might flourish at this network level in ways that are not feasible at the institutional level.
When we discuss Web 2.0, there is a temptation to think about blogs and wikis, RSS and a Facebook application, and to stop there. There is also some useful thinking about how to expose web services or data in ways that they can be remixed into other applications. However, Web 2.0 is also about concentration, concentration of data, of users and of communications. We need also to think about how libraries reconfigure services in an environment of network level gravitational hubs, driven by network effects. This will involve greater concentration of library resources in various ways, and also - probably? - greater reliance on other web presences to deliver their services.
February 28, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
Here is the opening paragraph of an article on libraries and the long tail I wrote a while ago.
Discussions of the long tail that I have seen or heard in the library community strike me as somewhat partial. Much of that discussion is about how libraries contain deep and rich collections, and about how their system-wide aggregation represents a very long tail of scholarly and cultural materials (a system may be at the level of a consortium, or a state, or a country). However, I am not sure that we have absorbed the real relevance of the long tail argument, which is about how well supply and demand are matched in a network environment. It is not enough for materials to be present within the system: they have to be readily accessible ('every reader his or her book', in Ranganathan's terms), potentially interested readers have to be aware of them ('every book its reader'), and the system for matching supply and demand has to be efficient ('save the time of the user'). [Libraries and the Long Tail: Some Thoughts about Libraries in a Network Age]
I go on to suggest that this dynamic will result in libraries wanting to disclose their presences in more network-level resources. Think of OhioLink for example, which aggregates supply across Ohio collections (a single point of entry to find it/get it services across all Ohio academic libraries), and which aggregates demand (it is a draw for users who have access to a broad aggregate collection). Think of links back to library collections from Google Scholar. And so on.
I quoted this piece in a comment I left on a blog post by Bob Molyneux on the Open-ILS blog. Bob is talking about this phenomenon in action in Georgia Pines.
Georgia has a universal borrower card so if your local library is not in PINES, you can go to one that is and borrow from the PINES system. And what library users are doing is pretty clear, they are making the drive: they want access to the 2 million bibliographic entities and the over 9 million items owned by the libraries in PINES. ...
... I was graduated from library school in 1971 and I have seen various fashions about how best to do library service: big regionals or small local and intimate libraries. Back and forth. Back and forth. I believe the jury is now in. Library users are voting with their feet; they want the big, resource rich library. [Every reader his or her book; Every book its reader. Open-ILS blog.]
On the web, I suggest, the desire to use the 'big, resource rich library' is even stronger, whether those 'libraries' are general network services (Google), specialist services (Google Scholar, Scopus), or aggregate library resources (OhioLink, Georgia Pines).
February 26, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
Over the Christmas break I read the interesting Global Ireland: same difference. And, in my convalescence, I have been looking at other materials on this topic. I had a look at OAIster. A search on Ireland and globablization returned quite a few results. I was interested in browsing through the results on the first page: six of the items were immediately available to me; four were not: I was directed to a publisher's splash page.
Now, I had, mistakenly, thought that OAIster focused on open access material so was surprised to see this. Looking at historic snapshots of the site on the Wayback Machine, I found the following on the 16th July 2006. There had been a stated focus on 'freely-accessible' material, but this changed.
OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Our goal is to create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources (what are digital resources? why is the "freely-available" designation gone?) that are easily searchable by anyone. [OAIster Home]
Following the link [not working in the extract above] about the '"freely-available" designation' brings you to the OAIster Collection Development Policy, which is admirably clear, and reasonable for a service provider in their situation. Basically, as sites mix freely-accessible material and restricted-access-material in their harvestable sets, there is a heavy processing burden on an aggregator who wants to reliably separate these out. And OAIster has decided it is not going to do this work.
Often, data contributor repositories that we harvest contain records that point to both freely-available and restricted-access digital resources. Sometimes repositories partition these records into OAI sets (e.g., "freely accessible texts") that can be easily harvested, and sometimes they do not. When they do not, additional effort on our part is required to selectively filter only the freely-accessible digital resource records. This is entirely dependent on the records themselves-- the metadata itself must contain some indication of restriction policy (e.g., "This material is accessible to the public, freely and without charge.") in order for us to perform filtering. Records frequently do not contain this information and only by following the link to the digital resource does availability become clear. Consequently, the decision to keep or not keep an entire repository's records based on the discovery of some restricted records has been challenging. [OAIster | Collection Development Policy]
This is a reminder of the variety of collection development practice over institutional repositories which I have spoken about before (in relation to Minnesota and the Open University). I notice that the Open University self-describes its repository as Open Access, yet it contains a large amount of restricted access materials.
Related entries:
February 23, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, User experience
Fiona MacCarthy has a very nice article in today's Guardian about Colin St John Wilson and the building which was to become his life's work.
Perhaps only an intellectual modernist such as Wilson could have tackled the architectural challenges inherent in designing the largest public building in Britain in the 20th century. The British Library is almost certainly the last great public building of such scale and seriousness that we shall ever see. Most great public buildings have their share of problems, and the British Library's epic history of setbacks is well known. As governments changed - from Harold Wilson through to Margaret Thatcher - policies altered and funding was cut back. The site was moved from Bloomsbury to Euston Road. Detailed plans for the building had to be amended in the light of the constantly evolving, complex new technologies of the "information age". For the architect himself, the commission that had seemed something of a national honour was transformed into the endurance test he used to refer to as his "30 years' war". ...... His first ambition would have been to build a great cathedral, but a library came second. He retained a childlike vision of a "magic mountain of all the knowledge in the world". ...... Is this a factory or is it a temple? A library needs to be a bit of both. The approach from Euston Road through the temple-like main portico across the piazza with its little built-in amphitheatre focuses the mind. Wilson's ideal libraries were always places redolent of intellectual continuity, alive with "the buzz of scholars of the past", and the walk across the courtyard evokes a corresponding buzz of previous architects:..... [ A house for the mind | Art & Architecture | guardian.co.uk Arts]
Related entries:
February 11, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
When to use general network level services to get library work done, and when to develop library-specific approaches?: this is a question that now comes up in several places.
Here is an interesting intiative from the National Library of Australia, using del.ico.us to support collaborative virtual reference.
AskNow librarians need to balance the time necessary to search for reliable and freely accessible web-based resources, with user expectations that they will receive relevant information instantaneously. The challenge lies not only in searching for, but also evaluating websites, in a short space of time. Librarians involved with the AskNow service (www.asknow.gov.au) recently started using the social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us), to help them meet that challenge. [AskNow's del.icio.us Useful Resources - GATEWAYS - National Library of Australia] AskNow’s del.icio.us webpage, at http://del.icio.us/usefulresources, assists librarians in finding relevant websites and online resources quickly, whilst also satisfying user expectations and matching their information needs. When a question is received the librarian can search within del.icio.us/usefulresources for an appropriate website and share it with the patron. [AskNow's del.icio.us Useful Resources - GATEWAYS - National Library of Australia]
February 05, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
There is a lot of buzz around Evergreen: there is excitement about an open source integrated library system. There is another aspect of it that is interesting, which I haven't seen so much discussion about.
Evergreen was developed to support PINES in Georgia. It was designed to support consortial working. (And yes, I understand that individual institutions are looking at it also.) I think that this is interesting as we will probably see more consortial activity over time as the benefits of shared working and aggregate access become clearer. In this context, for example, it will be interesting to see what the impact on library use the availability of 'one big library on the web' in Georgia will be ....
PINES experienced a whopping 40 percent increase in lending during the past year. A statewide consortium that has grown to include more than 275 public libraries and affiliated service outlets in 137 counties, the Public Information Network for Electronic Services -- PINES, for short -- offers Georgia citizens a shared catalog of more than 9.3 million items, with a single library card that is welcomed in all member libraries. PINES now boasts more than 1.7 million registered cardholders -- just under 19 percent of the state's population but more than 35 percent of the citizens living in a county served by the system. [Use of Georgia's public libraries continues to rise in Internet Age]
As part of this trend to consortial working, I believe that we will see more collaborative sourcing of shared systems. This results in a concentration of technical capacity, which may make those groups more willing to consider open source solutions like Evergreen.
Related entries:
February 01, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
I mentioned the other day that the Times had nominated Philip Larkin, poet and librarian ("the toad work") as the greatest British writer since 1945.
Through the wonders of resource sharing I have got hold of a copy of his history of the library at the University of Hull, updated by Maeve Brennan (from Western Michigan University, if you are interested ;-).
Larkin, Philip, and Maeve Brennan. A Lifted Study-Storehouse The Brynmor Jones Library, 1929-1979. Philip Larkin memorial series, no.1. Hull: Hull University Press, 1987.
There, I was interested to read:
.... independent history implies independence of operation, and since a library is always first and foremost a service it should be reluctant to arrogate to itself any qualities suggesting an identity separate from the community it serves.
Which is a nice reminder that libraries are not ends in themselves. Something that is very well said by Eleanor Jo Rodger in one of the more interesting things I have read in the last few years (in the September 2007 American Libraries). Interesting enough to bear repeating. She places the library in the context of its host environment, and closes with this paragraph:
Creating value for our host systems always involves three things: Librarians must understand their host systems; they must understand the source of their claim to being a legitimate part of their system; and they must do their work well so the system is better because they are there. It's usually far more a matter of asking and listening than it is of telling and pleading.
Incidentally, 'study-storehouse' pulls together - a little clumsily? - the dual role of the library as a place for people and as a store for materials discussed by Larkin in the text.
Related entries:
January 23, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
Library jargon explained: a resource at Swansea University Library and Information Services. Good that they have provided this? Bad that we need it?
Call number - The call number, the number placed on the spine of a book, is a code which provides information about the subject of the book and its location in the library. Books are arranged by subject so that you can find other similar books nearby. Our finding, borrowing and reserving page has more information. In the Swansea University libraries we use Library of Congress classification. [Swansea University - Glossary A - L]
January 20, 2008
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Categories:
Featured
, General - systems and technologies
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, OCLC
Just as I began to see messages about the publication of Marshall Breeding's report on his survey of library perceptions of their system vendor I was reading The new economics of the BI market by Jerry Held on The Database Column blog.
He talks about consolidation within the BI (Business Intelligence) market: "After more than a dozen acquisitions made by Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion over the past few years, these BI tools/analytics industry leaders were themselves snapped up in a matter of months by SAP, IBM, and Oracle respectively." And he notes the earlier consolidation of the underlying database industry around Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
Held argues that consolidation has improved the overall BI marketplace. It delivers - he suggests - economies of scale and economies of innovation (and, although he does not mention it by name, economies of scope). These 'mega-vendors' offer a range of products. For some customers, the ability to concentrate interaction with a single vendor, a single helpdesk, and a single contract, and to benefit from discounts, are important benefits. For vendors, it should be possible to remove redundant costs in administration and distribution. Competition between a small number of dominant players is good for the market.
He suggests, however, that the mega-vendors find it difficult to innovate or meet new needs; they have a very full array of products spread over a large customer base. This means that there will always be investment available to new entrants who innovate around technology or business models to meet evolving needs.
He points to open source and SaaS (software as a service) as two important business model innovations. He also provides some technology innovation examples, emphasizing performance and price improvements.
Does this map onto the process automation providers within the library community? Here are some thoughts, focusing on the US environment. (And, full disclosure, OCLC has some offerings in some of the areas I discuss below.)
There has definitely been consolidation within the classic ILS environment. This is good in principle, as the library market - not very big to begin with - has been overpopulated with vendors trying to provide a full range of products. In practice, of course, much depends on how the remaining vendors work through integration issues. We can see some potential economies of scope (as diversifying library needs can be met from a single source) and scale (as development, support and R&D are consolidated).
However, none of these vendors is very large, they operate in a small community, and they have limited organic growth opportunities in their historic core. They have moved to meet diversifying library needs with additional products. Accordingly, we have seen that process automation for the 'bought/physical collection' (the ILS) has been joined by process automation for the 'licensed collection' (metasearch, resolution,knowledge base,ERM), and the 'digital collection' (repositories). Other products have also appeared to meet more specific needs (self-service, e-reserves, ...). Recently, a new category of discovery system has emerged which pulls together institutional data (from the ILS and from repositories), and several products have appeared. Now, each vendor has a significant development challenge in creating this full array of products, and we have seen some licensing of other components (support for metasearch or knowledge base, for example). Interestingly, we have not seen these companies acquire new entrants who are also developing these newer products (more of these below).
And, although we have seem some libraries acquire pieces from different vendors this is not as widespread as one might expect for some of the reasons suggested above. There are economies in dealing with as few vendors as possible. In addition, the library community has quite a personalized relationship with its ILS vendor community which adds to the incentives to acquire various components from the same vendor.
Marshall suggests that 'dissatisfaction and concern prevail' in this marketplace. I think we can expect further consolidation, as the number of vendors here reduces to two or three, maybe with particular specialties.
What about innovation? There is some concern that there has been little innovation in the classic ILS space, which matches Held's observation. That said, we can point to Ex Libris's collaboration with Herbert Van Der Sompel around the deployment of resolution as a service as a notable instance, or experimentation with ERM. It is not surprising that as new areas have been identified we have seen a range of new entrants, sometimes emerging from within the library or academic community. See for example Serials Solutions, which aims to provide a complete approach to licensed collections. The metasearch and resolution arena has seen several companies emerge, some of whom syndicate services to other players. See for example Muse Global, Openly Informatics (now part of OCLC), WebFeat or TDnet. And more recently, as we have seen attention to better discovery environments, Aquabrowser is being deployed by some libraries.
One area where innovation has been slow is in how the library systems apparatus engages with the tools that people are increasingly using to organize their own information spaces, at the browser level, or in social bookmarking, social networking, and other network-level sites.
Business model innovation? Held mentions Open Source and SaaS (Software as a Service). We have seen two major areas of open source development. The first is in the area of repositories, where we see Fedora, Dspace, and Eprints. The effort involved in deployment here may be high. Each initiative has gone through some organizational development, looking for ways to sustain itself, and the role of grant/foundation money has been important. The second is in the ILS arena, where Koha and Evergreen are receiving a lot of attention. Koha is more widely deployed; there have been some recent high-profile commitments to Evergreen. There are also some other areas where open source solutions are in use: metasearch (e.g. Index Data, LibraryFind), text searching (e.g. Lucene, Index Data), and a recent interest in 'next generation catalog' solutions (e.g. Solr, Vufind). Index Data has been active for a while, with a strong niche presence in Z39.50 applications and text searching and metasearch offerings. One interesting development is the emerging support industry here, where Care Affiliates, Index Data, Equinox and LibLime will offer support and consultancy. It will be interesting to see how this range of activity develops in coming years. In part it will probably depend on the ability of this nascent support industry to meet mainstream library requirements for support and reliability; and in part of course on the ability to continue to develop the software.
And what about SaaS? SaaS tends to be used quite loosely. Think simply of three levels. The first is where individual instances of an application are hosted. This may save the library some costs (hardware, sysadmin) but does not really alter the service model in other ways. A second is a 'multi-tenancy' model where multiple customers may be served from the same instance, but each with their own virtual application, potentially with configuration options. This may deliver savings but there may also be service improvements. Enhancements, fixes, etc, are available to all at the same time. Serials Solutions' services might be an example here. The third level becomes more interesting where shared use of a service generates network effects. Take a hypothetical example: a supplier could more easily develop recommender systems across multiple circulation systems. An actual example appears to be provided by Aquabrowser's announcement of its MyDiscoveries feature which aims to share user contributions to the catalog across customer instances. The SaaS model has been rapidly adopted in wider contexts, and while there has been some library adoption, it is interesting that there is not a high level of discussion of the approach.
Marshall writes:
The year 2007 saw considerable upheaval in the library automation industry. To get some sense of the aftermath of the recent rounds of mergers, acquisitions, product consolidations, and to gauge interest in open source automation systems, I created and executed a survey that aims to measure the prevailing perceptions in libraries. [Perceptions 2007: an International Survey of Library Automation]
What is interesting to me is the extent to which the ecology of library process automation is richer than it was a few years ago. If we think of managing three materials workflows (bought/print, licensed/electronic, digitized/digital), and the progressive movement of libraries into the latter two, then we see that library needs are now potentially met by a wide number of players. The classic ILS vendors remain central players, but they have been joined by others.
The ILS vendors have products in all three areas, and are developing new discovery products. We have seen new entrants in the repository space (including ContentDM, now owned by OCLC) and in the licensed materials space (resolover, knowledgebase, metasearch, ERM) where a variety of products are available from a range of vendors. In this context, the collection of services within the Cambridge Information Group is interesting (Serials Solutions, Refworks, Illumina, Aquabrowser as well as other bibliographic products). And, of course, OCLC provides services also. Open source offerings have emerged to meet needs across the board.
We will definitely see more convergence alongside further new entrants. It will be interesting to see how the Open Source offerings develop, and I think that we will see some game-changing offerings in the SaaS space.
I hope Marshall repeats the survey. It would be interesting to extend its scope - if that can be done without too much loss of focus - to consider more of the wider process automation landscape.
Related entries:
Pointer to MyDiscoveries via Meredith Farkas.
January 10, 2008
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Categories:
Knowledge organization and representation
, Libraries - organization and services
, Metadata
The final report of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control has been submitted and is now available on the LC website.
On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (January 9, 2008)
 Read final report [PDF, 442 KB]
[News and Press Releases - Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (Library of Congress)]
Note: I am a member of the Group.
January 06, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - organization and services
From the ever-suggestive William Gibson ..
Did Borges ever imagine a library in which we could know which volumes users were thinking about consulting? [William Gibson]
He is pointing to a recent article about the analysis of user data by Google and the types of intelligence they can derive from it. The article cites John Battelle's well-known idea of the "database of intentions", the progressively richer map of user choice and intention that Google is developing.
I worked many years ago in public libraries in Dublin, at a time, I reluctantly acknowledge, when circulation systems were manual. I remember admiring the knowledge of those who had worked for a long time in branches, knowledge of their stock and knowledge of their readers. It seemed to me that the best understood the secret lives of books, as represented by the people who read them. The very best understood as well the secret lives of their readers, as represented by the books they read. They could make the types of connections that we are now seeing automated as 'intentional data' is collected and mined, in social networking sites, and in recommender systems.
Related entries:
December 30, 2007
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, User experience
I was interested to receive a note about the new Pew study [pdf] on how people go about solving problems involving information needs. It was interesting to see the positive message about libraries.
The survey results challenge the assumption that libraries are losing relevance in the internet age. Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose. [Information searches that solve problems]
I am still away so have not had time to digest the report, and I am sure that there will be a lot of comment in coming days and weeks. I will certainly be reading it closely on my return.
However, my eye was caught by one important finding. While 58% of people surveyed said that they turned to the Internet when faced with one of the problems posed, 53% said that they turned to a professional (doctor, financial expert, etc). This is unsurprising in itself. These are "information professionals"; they "manage knowledge". If it means anything, this is part of what living in an 'information society' means: the management of information and knowledge is an integral part of large areas of what we do. Libraries and librarians have an important role here. The professional outlook of the archivist is becoming more important in interesting ways. However, against this wider background continued use of the phrase "information professionals" seems an increasingly misguided practice. Information management is central to many professional practices and many types of information are managed.
December 13, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Libraries - organization and services
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
I find library strategy documents an interesting indicator of trends.
I do think that looking at how organizations present themselves and what is important to them in the documents they produce is revealing, documents such as annual reports, strategies, job ads, websites, org charts, and so on. It would be interesting to see more analysis of them. Of course, we would have to be cautious in assuming too much about what they do reveal! [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Self disclosure]
I recently came across the Emory 5 year strategy document (2008-2012). It is pretty interesting in its range and ambition.
Through the implementation of its strategic plan, the Emory University Libraries (the Library) will be recognized as a model research library that fosters courageous inquiry through the integration of print, digital, and multi-media resources. During the next five years, the Library will strengthen further its distinctive work in two areas: digital information technology and special collections. At the same time, leaders in specific areas throughout the Emory library system will work collaboratively with both internal and external partners to increase access to these exceptional tools, systems, and resources; support new modes of teaching, learning, research, and scholarly communication; and preserve, store, and manage traditional and digital materials for future generations. By fulfilling these objectives, the Library will play a central role in both the creation and dissemination of knowledge and serve as an intellectual bridge between communities at Emory and between Emory and the external world. ... ... The Library’s aggressive strategic plan, which will require roughly $100 million to implement, reflects the vision and priorities of Emory University. First, the plan leverages areas of particular strength within the library, namely advanced digital library technologies and renowned special collections, in much the same way the University’s strategic themes reflect areas of distinctive achievement and potential at Emory. Second, the plan proposes to mobilize leadership throughout the libraries to build a customer-centered organization and to increase access to resources for scholars both within and beyond Emory, just as the strategic initiatives look beyond our community. Third, the plan connects to the strategic themes by strengthening faculty distinction, preparing engaged scholars, reaching out to the external community, and increasing access to resources for scholarship in interdisciplinary fields. [Five Year Strategy for the Emory Libraries]
I was particularly struck here by two emphases which indicate a direction. The first is the very strong emphasis on "collaboration in production and dissemination of knowledge". The library aims to engage much more deeply with research behaviors, supporting faculty in their digital scholarship, and the creation and sharing of their research outputs. The second is the focus on the distinctive contribution of their special collections, "the laboratory of the humanities", on building these up and on connecting them to developing digital research environments.
The emphasis here is on institutional resources: the unique or rare materials that the library has acquired for its users, or the intellectual output of the university faculty. One of the interesting things to ponder is how the latter may be the "special collections" of the future, as the library takes these materials into curatorial care.
Related entries:
December 03, 2007
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