May 07, 2008
•
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.
May 02, 2008
•
Categories:
Libraries - distributed environments
, OCLC
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
Some items of possible interest which were in a little email pile waiting for attention ......
Arrow
An Australian colleague alerted me to the redesign of the Arrow Discovery Service. Arrow aggregates access to Australian research repositories.
Welcome to the ARROW Discovery Service - where you can search 143,582 Australian research outputs, including theses; preprints; postprints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.
The ARROW Discovery Service searches simultaneously across the contents of Australian university research repositories. The list of currently participating universities, and the number of outputs currently in each repository, is listed at the left. [Arrow]
Search box is complemented by tag cloud access. Results filtering by facets, including institutional facets. Alerts can be set (although it does not have RSS feeds, as I notice Roddy MacLeod pointed out somewhere).
Catalog Widget
The Information Resource Centre (IRC) at Jacobs University, Bremen, has produced a catalog widget, jOPAC, as part of its broader initiative to produce a range of 'Web 2 tools'.
The IRC has started developing Web 2.0 tools. Because we want to be able to deliver digital (library and multimedia) services at the point of need, where our patrons are. And because we want to enhance our services by mashing them up with other available services out there on the web. [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]
The are using the Universal Widget API from Netvibes:
Using the UAW API allows easy implementation within various platforms, such as iGoogle, Macintosh, Vista, Yahoo Dashboard, and various others. This way, any developed tool can easily integrate within any supported platform - some of which you might already use! [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]
See a jOPAC demo here.
I was interested to see the University Confluence-based wiki infrastructure that the pages above are part of. Also interesting is the dedicated focus on such tools that IRC is making.
Linking from Wageningen
As linking between systems becomes more important, so does our interest in identifiers, and in mappings between identifiers. Here is an example from Wouter Gerritsma:
Previously I announced that we made use of the Google Books API to link to the full text whenever possible. We only experienced two problems with this service. First, the quite frequent Google spam warnings, which have been partially resolved but still keep coming back. Second, we did not have the required OCLC or LCCN numbers for the pre-ISBN books in our catalog. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]
He goes on to describe a service from our OCLC Dutch colleagues that returns an OCLC number when fed a Pica Production Number, which they have in their catalog. And the results:
A few examples are: Even when the full text is not available on Google Books, the service can be usefull. In the following example of Hogg, R. (1884) The fruit manual, the electronic version of the 1860 edition is available on Google Books rather than the 1884 edition we have in our collection. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]
April 18, 2008
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - distributed environments
, OCLC
I recently came across xignite, a financial web services company. Here is their blurb ....
Financial events around the world impact not only finance professionals but every business. This is why successful businesses integrate key financial information into the processes and applications their employees or clients use every day. Until now, this integration has been a challenge. Xignite answers that challenge by letting you access the latest financial and industry data on-demand, and easily integrate it straight into your company's mission-critical applications using through web services. With Xignite, you can make your business financial-aware in minutes. [Global Financial Data, News & Information Web Services - Xignite]
I liked the expression 'making your business financial-aware' through web services.
Worldcat.org is a bibliographic 'destination' and is used heavily in that way. For example, it is an important scholarly tool given its topical reach and historic depth. I recently came across an interesting niche use, when I was told by a used book seller that he uses it to discover how widely distributed an item is, or to identify libraries who might be interested in buying an item.
However, very importantly, it is also a switch into the library network. It connects discovery to actual locations, and depending on your institutional affiliation it offers you various services against those locations. In this way, Worldcat.org discloses library collections and services on the web.
In recent years, we have seen many bibliographic destinations emerge. They are variously positioned in terms of value creation. Amazon, AbeBooks, Goodreads, Google Book Search, LibraryThing, Live Search Books, OpenLibrary, the Library of Congress catalog, many national and regional library union catalogs (for example Libraries Australia, COPAC, OhioLink, Bibsys, ....), and so on. This variety seem healthy to me, and Worldcat sits alongside this range as one more destination with its own characteristics and uses. An increasingly valuable destination, we trust!
However, we also hope that Worldcat is also used by the other sites - and it is - as a switch. It is a way for other sites to add value by providing access to library resources. And it creates value for libraries by making them present in other environments where people look for, work with, share information about, books and other resources. It allows libraries to disclose collections and services in other environments.
As we move forward with the Worldcat API, this allows Worldcat functionality to be made available to other applications. So, adapting the xignite phrasing above, the Worldcat API will make applications 'bibliographic-aware'; however, thinking of the switch functionality, it will also help make applications 'library-network aware'. It will allow applications to incorporate access to a network of library assets, and to focus in on particular ones of interest. We can do this because of the collective investment by the library community and OCLC in Worldcat and registry data.
I was prompted to do this post by another interesting post from Mark Dahl where he talks about (my words) how OCLC can make the library network available at the network level, to other applications as well as to user interfaces.
OCLC has this valuable data, and great potential to develop things with it, as well as a general current towards network-level computing moving in its favor. When an libraries compare OCLC's products with that of a traditional ILS vendor, they need to see that the OCLC product is more than technology. Rather, it is an extension of a community, a network. [synthesize-specialize-mobilize: OCLC's competitive advantage]
April 11, 2008
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, OCLC
The New York Times carries an article this week about the economics of digital preservation. The context is the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access co-chaired by my colleague Brian Lavoie.
All that work is going on, Dr. Lavoie said, but “that misses the point” that the task force was formed to examine: ensuring that the various technologies make economic sense. “You can have the most elegant technological solution to the digital-preservation problem, but if there’s no economics underpinning it, then there’s no solution at all,” he said. [In Storing 1’s and 0’s, the Question Is $ - New York Times]
Brian has an article outlining the work of the Task Force in the current issue of the D-Lib Magazine.
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]]
April 01, 2008
•
Categories:
General - distributed environments
, General - systems and technologies
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, OCLC
I have just finished Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch. Here is a sample:
The complexity and inefficiency of the client-server model have fed on themselves over the last quarter century. As companies continue to add more applications, they have to expand their data centers, install new machines, reprogram old ones, and hire ever larger numbers of technicians to keep everything running. When you also take into account that businesses have to buy backup equipment in case a server or storage system fails, you realize that, as studies indicate, most of the many trillions of dollars that companies have invested into information technology have gone to waste. [The Big Switch, p. 56]
Most of the software and almost all of the hardware that companies use today are essentially the same as the hardware and software their competitors use. Computers, storage systems, networking gear, and most widely used applications have all become commodities from the standpoint of the businesses that buy them. They don't distinguish one company from the next. The same goes for the employees who staff IT departments. Most perform routine maintenance chores - exactly the same tasks that their counterparts in other companies carry out. The replication of tens of thousands of independent data centers, all using similar hardware, running similar software, and employing similar kinds of workers, has imposed severe penalties on the economy. It has led to the overbuilding of IT assets in almost every sector of industry, dampening the productivity gains that can spring from computer automation. [The Big Switch, p. 57]
Carr makes an analogy with electric power. Many years ago, companies would have had their own power generators. This was very inefficient and we moved to a utility model, where generating capacity was concentrated and delivered to others over the electric grid. He foresees the emergence of a similar model with computing and applications, a movement to a utility model where capacity is delivered as required over the network.
Of course, as he notes, this is already upon us. Think of a couple of prominent examples: Amazon Web Services and the range of Salesforce.com's services.
Amazon provides computation, storage and other services on an on-demand basis. Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, has an interesting presentation where he talks about Amazon's webscale services and discusses their rationale. The subtitle of the presentation is "compete on ideas, not resources". In terms that echo Carr's, he talks about the 70/30 switch, claiming that 70% of a firm's "time, energy and dollars is spent on undifferentiated heavy lifting" in building out infrastructure, while 30% is spent on "differentiated value creation". Amazon wants to help organizations reverse those numbers, reducing the time spent on undifferentiated, increasingly commodity, infrastructure.
I was looking at My Starbucks Idea the other day and was interested to see that it was powered by force.com. This is a suite of on-demand tools from Salesforce.com which claim to allow you to build enterprise applications without any custom development work. What immediately struck me was the way in which the service was promoted, echoing Carr and Vogels: the strapline is "Finally, focus on innovation, not infrastructure". I liked their line: Free up the dollars wasted "keeping the lights on"
with a zero-infrastructure model.
The 'big switch' is going to be a major issue for libraries over the next few years. They spend too much time getting their systems to work, and not enough time putting them to work.
Of course, much will depend on what types of services are available to libraries from their providers and it will be as interesting to see how those providers reconfigure their offerings in coming years and what new providers emerge.
Note: I was prompted to note the Big Switch after reading and commenting on Mark Dahl's post here.
Related entries:
March 31, 2008
•
Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Metadata
, OCLC
My Programs colleagues have released an interesting review [pdf] of copyright investigation practices across several RLG Partners.
In this project, staff from eight partner institutions participated in copyright investigation interviews between August and September 2007 to share the ways in which their institutions currently obtain copyright permission to provide users with access to high-risk or special collection materials. [Copyright investigation summary report - PDF]
It’s also important to note that staff who participated from almost every institution expressed a sense of “just getting started” or “realigning efforts to be more consistent across campus and across library units.” Almost all of the staff interviewed were in newly created positions; several noted that conducting copyright investigations in a centralized fashion was a new area of focus for their institutions. [Copyright investigation summary report - PDF]
This report is interesting in its own right as a review of practices. It also contributes background information to ongoing work at OCLC exploring a Registry of Copyright Evidence.
Related entry:
March 24, 2008
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, OCLC
, Search
Well, another very fine issue of the Code4Lib Journal has appeared.
Jody L DeRidder has an interesting piece describing how they used browsable link pages (by subject, name, ..) and sitemaps to improve the visibility of a particular resource to search engines. The discussion gets into some of the issues of trying to get crawled, indexed, and then ranked: decision criteria may be applied by the search engines at each of these steps. Tony Boston, then with the National Library of Australia, published an article a while ago on experiences at the National Library of Australia in exposing materials to search engines and includes some pointers based on lessons learned. I hope that we see more of these types of articles as SSEO (social/search engine optimization) is a topic of growing importance for libraries. Here is sentence from Jody's conclusion:
Within three months of completion of this project, over 4 times as many hits and over 5 times as many users were recorded in a month as had ever been previously measured. [The Code4Lib Journal - Googlizing a Digital Library]
Update: See also the following article in the current issue of Dlib Magazine. Clearly articles on digital library search engine optimization are like buses. None comes for ages, and then several come together.
Site Design Impact on Robots: An Examination of Search Engine Crawler Behavior at Deep and Wide Websites
Joan A. Smith and Michael L. Nelson, Old Dominion University
doi:10.1045/march2008-smith
[D-Lib Magazine (March/April 2008)]
And I should mention that my colleagues have an article on metadata crosswalking in this issue of Code4Lib also:
This paper discusses an approach and set of tools for translating bibliographic metadata from one format to another. A computational model is proposed to formalize the notion of a ‘crosswalk’. The translation process separates semantics from syntax, and specifies a crosswalk as machine executable translation files which are focused on assertions of element equivalence and are closely associated with the underlying intellectual analysis of metadata translation. A data model developed by the authors called Morfrom serves as an internal generic metadata format. Translation logic is written in an XML scripting language designed by the authors called the Semantic Equivalence Expression Language (Seel). These techniques have been built into an OCLC software toolkit to manage large and diverse collections of metadata records, called the Crosswalk Web Service. [The Code4Lib Journal]
March 24, 2008
•
Categories:
Miscellaneous
, OCLC
A little off topic .. but I was interested to see Columbus, Ohio, listed as number one in a Forbes.com report of a list of Top 10 Up-and-Coming Tech Cities. This is the result of work done by Philip Auerswald, professor of public policy at George Mason University.
The brief report highlights the location of Battelle in Columbus. From a library point of view, it is also interesting to note that it is the home of Chemical Abstracts.
For those that don't know, OCLC is based in Dublin [Wikipedia], effectively a North Western suburb of Columbus [Wikipedia].
Incidentally, I thought it was good the way Contact us was highlighted at the top of the Battelle website, showing the phone numbers.
March 13, 2008
•
Categories:
Metadata
, OCLC
 We have updated the audience level experimental service pages.
In this initiative we are using the pattern of holdings across different types of libraries (school, research, etc) to give a 'hint' about the level of interest of an item (juvenile, research/specialist, ...). You can read more about how we calculate the levels on the project page: Recognizing that different types of libraries typically serve different populations, OCLC researchers considered whether library types could be related to audience levels. They decided to explore whether the pattern of holdings of materials in WorldCat might be leveraged to provide an audience-level indicator. [Audience Level [OCLC - Projects]]
We have used the audience level on internal projects where materials need to be filtered in a particular way. In Worldcat identities we show an average audience level for an author (Gordon Korman gets 0.17). In this service we roll things up to the work level, and we show a list of manifestations (editions, etc) for each work.
My colleagues constructed an experiment to compare the results we got with this approach with cataloguer assessments. The audience level 'hint' compared reasonably well with the human assignments. A paper on this work will be published in due course.
'Audience level' may not be quite the right name for this. Classics for example will get lower level than you might expect if you just think about 'difficulty'. Thus spake Zarathustra, for example, has a level of 0.38: because of its 'classic' status it is widely available through public libraries.
The experimental service pages have a nice slider feature to show different audience levels in a collection of Zoology books (which were used in the experiment). (And we link all titles through to worldcat.org.)
March 13, 2008
•
Categories:
Miscellaneous
, OCLC
I withdrew from a commitment to the BCLA conference a couple of months ago. This is not something I did lightly or do often and I apologize to Penny Swanson who nominated me and to the organizers. A clash with some other events emerged. I am pleased that my colleague Jim Michalko was able to step in and redeem the situation. I don't always get invited back; Jim does ;-)
I don't usually signal my future movements in these pages, but as I wanted to write a note about the BCLA event it seems appropriate to mention those other events here ....
I was very pleased to be asked by Liz Lyon, UKOLN Director, to speak at the thirtieth anniversary celebration of UKOLN at the British Library. I worked at UKOLN, at the University of Bath, for many years, so I did not want to miss this. Andrew Pace mentioned Maurice Line a while ago, a major figure in British librarianship. Maurice was the library director at the University of Bath for a couple of years, and it was from his interests at that time that the precursor organizations to UKOLN emerged. Here is Maurice as quoted by Andrew:
"Trying to hold on to unused publications that libraries no longer have room to house, having theological arguments about the contents of catalogue records, and indulging in the numerous other irrelevant, inappropriate or trivial activities of which librarians are so fond, with their unerring eye for the inessential." [Hectic Pace]
I am also speaking on a panel at the JISC Conference to be held in Birmingham a few days later. This combines a retrospective view of the influential eLib programme (web site archive), and the decade of activity since then, with a discussion of the future of academic libraries. I am also particularly pleased to be doing this as my then UKOLN colleagues and I were heavily involved with eLib. I discuss this decade at length elsewhere.
The JISC Conference is being sponsored by OCLC and there will be a stand devoted to OCLC Programs and Research activity at the event. Check out the pre-conference interview with John MacColl, European director of the RLG Partnership.
In between these events, I will be speaking at the LIR Heanet annual symposium in Dublin (14th April). This event is at the iconic if architecturally uninspiring Liberty Hall, and I hope that I can get to see the view from the top.
UKOLN30
March 12, 2008
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, OCLC
Here are some blogs of potential interest, two from OCLC and one from JISC.
From OCLC:
The Developers' Network blog
This provide updates about services which allow applications integrate OCLC services and data.
And Andrew Pace reappears in a new location:
Hectic Pace
JISC now has a blog from the Information Environment Team, which, if they keep going ;-), will be a good place to look for developments in repositories, preservation and resource discovery. There will be a UK emphasis, but it should also be of general interest. No doubt, it will also be marked by 'high acronymic density'.
Information environment team
Roy alerted me to Andrew's reappearance (and he also writes for The Developers' Network blog). Thanks to eFoundations for the note about the Information Environment Team blog.
Incidentally, I reckon that eFoundations is currently one of the most consistently interesting blogs in our space. I say 'currently' because I find that preferences shift with changing interests. Fickle me or what ... ;-)
February 19, 2008
•
Categories:
OCLC
Follow Worldcat.org and related developments at the new Worldcat blog.
February 15, 2008
•
Categories:
GLAM
, Metadata
, OCLC
My colleague Günter Waibel writes about a new RLG Programs project looking at the exchange of metadata between museum systems. Go to the entry for more detail.
With the generous support of a $145,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, RLG Programs will gather a select group of museum partners to accomplish the following: - Creating a low-barrier / no-cost batch export capability for CDWA Lite XML out of the collections management system used by the participating museums (GallerySystems TMS)
- Modeling data exchange processes using the Open Archive Information Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) at the participating museums
- Creating an aggregation of museum content within OCLC Research for analysis
- Discussing the evidence about the relative utility of the aggregation with stakeholders from the museum, vendor and aggregator community
[hangingtogether.org]
February 11, 2008
•
Categories:
Metadata
, OCLC
OCLC distributed around 2 million printed catalog cards last year. They are still being used ....
January 30, 2008
•
Categories:
Libraries - distributed environments
, Metadata
, OCLC
I have written before about how registries provide 'intelligence' in the network. Scalable loose coupling between library services will benefit from good ways to discover those services.
The Worldcat Registry includes data for library services (resolver, catalog, virtual reference) which drives Worldcat Local and Worldcat.org. Worldcat.org's 'understanding' of the library network is captured in the Registry.
A while ago the OpenURL Resolver Registry and Gateway were incorporated into the Worldcat Registry. The Registry is openly available and the Gateway is systematically used by several other parties including Zotero:
Zotero 1.0.2 also includes several new site translators, including translators for social media sites Flickr and YouTube. Zotero’s default Open URL resolver has also been changed to the OCLC OpenURL Resolver Gateway, which will allow many Zotero users to automatically find items from their collections in their campus library through the Locate button without editing their preferences. [Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool » Blog Archive » Our Most Stylish Release Yet: Zotero 1.0.2]
My colleague Joanna White tells me that use of the gateway is climbing. In November 2007, over 250,.000 requests were processed. There are currently about 1,600 resolvers registered.
Here are some details about use and update of the OpenURL Resolver registry and gateway.
[OCLC OpenURL Resolver Registry [OCLC]]
Related entries:
January 20, 2008
•
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.
December 22, 2007
•
Categories:
OCLC
, Social networking
It is nice to see the Worldcat application for Facebook. Look out for additional features over time.
December 15, 2007
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Categories:
Knowledge organization and representation
, OCLC
I am one of the two 'at large' members of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. A draft final report for comment was released a while ago and today is the final day for responses.
Karen Calhoun submitted a comment [PDF] on behalf of OCLC yesterday.
Update: Prompted by a query: Cliff Lynch and I are 'at large' members. Other members were nominated by the following organizations: American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Special Libraries Association, the National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural Library, Google, Microsoft Corporation and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging.
December 12, 2007
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Categories:
Knowledge organization and representation
, OCLC
A new version of the Deweybrowser has appeared. This is a prototype system with some nice features. It is built using Solr and highlights the use of a classification system in retrieval:
The DeweyBrowser, beta version 2.0, has a new interface and updated database. You can search for a topic or drill down through the summaries by clicking on a caption in the Dewey clouds. New features include the ability to filter search results by format, language of resource, and OCLC Audience Level. You can also search within a results set. The interface provides the option of displaying the captions in one of several languages. Available languages are English, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. The prototype provides access to approximately 2.5 million records from the OCLC Worldcat database. The records are indexed and searched using Apache Solr. [About the DeweyBrowser ]
December 11, 2007
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Categories:
OCLC
We are pleased to bring you once again the OCLC Programs and Research Holiday Card. Best bibliographic wishes to all over the holiday period and into the new year ...
Click on piechart segments to see the various underlying bibliographic systems: worldcat.org, worldcat identities, and the Deweybrowser ...
December 09, 2007
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Categories:
Miscellaneous
, OCLC
I spent a couple of days at Kansas University in congenial Lawrence during the week. I flew back to Columbus from Kansas City airport on Thursday evening. However, I did not see my soon-to-be colleague Andrew Pace who was apparently in the airport at the same time .....
When travelling I do sometimes wonder about the chances of unexpectedly meeting people at airports, those hubs of massive people flows. There must be studies somewhere about this. I rarely bump into anyone, though ....
December 03, 2007
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, OCLC
The National Library of Australia has released an interesting document about the value of union catalogues in general, and Libraries Australia in particular. Here is the concluding paragraph:
As Australian library collections move from managing print-based materials to managing
digital and licensed resources, the National Union Catalogue provides a significant platform
on which to examine, test and create a future for library services. [libraries australia: value statement PDF]
The union catalog was one of the earliest manifestations of library automation, and has been remarkably resilient feature of the library landscape since then. Consider for example the entries in the LIBER directory, Library Bibliographic Networks in Europe, which appeared in a second edition in 1992 after the success of the wildly popular first edition. Many of the organizations listed still exist 16 years later and still provide union catalogue services; some have been absorbed or transformed into other organizations which provide such services. This is despite a period in which distributed models have emerged alongside the union approach.
In fact, the last few years have seen some renewed interest in the union catalogue. An important factor here is the growth of shared activity at consortial or state/national level. It makes more sense to concentrate some types of activity in a network environment, and union catalogue organizations are natural venues to support this. Google, Amazon and others have also shown the advantages of data aggregation. Motivation here tends to cluster in two related lines: management-related and user-related.
On the management side there is interest in finding ways to remove unhelpful redundancy across operations, to build shared capacity, to achieve economies of scale and scope, to concentrate scarce technical or other expertise, and so on. As the range and complexity of what is expected from libraries grow, so do incentives to address management issues in a collaboratively sourced way. One might speculate that this is especially the case with libraries given their mission but there are also limited alternatives for the library which would like to achieve some of these same aims by sourcing with third party service providers. Think for example of what is available to the medium-sized library who would like to source an integrated range of library automation products (across ILS, ERM/metasearch/resolver, repository) as a service over the network, rather than as locally deployed software. We are very aware of some of the benefits of collaborative sourcing based on the good work of our neighbors here in Columbus, OhioLink. Another example is the Danish Electronic Research Library, which provides several centralized services including union catalogue.
The Value Statement draws attention to a couple of areas where union catalogues have newer roles. One is syndication of data. This has become of more interest recently as libraries work harder to place services in the user flow. However, for non-unique materials there needs to be some way of connecting a library's users with materials at their library. Google Scholar, for example, works with Worldcat and with several other union catalogs to direct users back to appropriate library collections. Another area is business intelligence, particularly in the form of collection analysis which has become of stronger interest as we look at mass digitization, coordination of off-site storage, and renewed interest in collaborative collection development.
On the user side, the advantages of a consolidated library presence on the network are being assessed. Again, the example of OhioLink is interesting here where the aggregate resources of Ohio academic libraries are made available to a user at any one of them. OhioLink aggregates supply, in that it provides a complete discovery to delivery service across a full range of library resources. It aggregates demand, in that it has a strong brand on the network and mobilizes use. Union catalogues have moved to represent more of the library collection, looking at licensed collections and digital materials.
For those interested in seeing what Libraries Australia aims to do over the next few years see the Libraries Australia Strategic Plan, July 2007 to June 2010 [PDF].
Reminder: the author works for the organization that manages Worldcat, the world's largest union catalogue.
November 28, 2007
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Categories:
GLAM
, Metadata
, OCLC
Reading the report [PDF] of the RLG Programs metadata practice survey, this quote from a respondent jumped out at me:
We use a variety of tools to produce a variety of records. Mature and established systems (such as our ILS) are generally effective. Tools for creation of XML are not as efficient - particularly EAD creation. Creation of EAD and ingest into our XML database is still a very manual process. Our tools are also generally not well integrated. Even when describing the same resource we use the ILS for creating MARC, home grown tools for creating EAD, and perhaps a third tool for creating item level descriptive metadata. [RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Practices Survey Results - PDF]
It is pretty indicative of general issues to emerge. Metadata creation practices are fragmented across different materials workflows with variable systems support.
... RLG Programs surveyed 18 Partner institutions1 in July and August 2007 to obt |
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