Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog

Bruges Public Library catalogue

2010-02-09T19:11:02Z

Prompted by a recent entry, I got a note from Koen Calis, Librarian Bruges Public Library, about their catalogue, Cabrio. Here is quite a full presentation which covers a range of interesting feature:

Cabriology The Bruges Aquabrowser Experience

View more presentations from Koen Calis.

I was interested in their adaptation of my colleague Robin Murray's synthesise/specialise/mobilise framework to frame the discussion. In his note, Koen remarked that "Bruges Public library considers the horizontal discovery of local resources (heritage collections, community information, courses and events, local advisory data...) to be a very important starting point for redeveloping our library into a local knowledge hub and to enhance participation of the local community".

Patterns of publication and library collections as measure of technology shifts?

2010-02-07T00:57:25Z

We were pleased to welcome Dr Michelle Alexopoulos from the University of Toronto to OCLC last week. Michelle is an economist whose recent research has focused on creating and analyzing new measures of technical change for developed economies.

The abstract of her talk gives a flavor of some of this work, and why it was of interest to us:

Can the patterns of library collections be used to measure economic growth and technological shifts? In this talk, Dr. Alexopoulos will unveil new indicators of technical change that, she argues, resolve many of the problems associated with traditional ones (e.g., research and development (R&D) intensity and patents). Dr. Alexopoulos' measures are primarily derived from previous unutilized information contained in MARC21 records (available from the Library of Congress and OCLC's WorldCat database) on new book titles in various fields of technology over the last century. Further, Dr. Alexopoulos will discuss how the indices are related to inputs into knowledge production (such as scientific advances and R&D), and demonstrate that the measures are closely correlated with the commercialization date of new technologies. Finally, she will highlight a number of questions that the new indicators can help answer. [Presentation splashpage]

We are very interested to see Worldcat data used in this way, alongside other sources of data about book publication and use (books in print data and sales data). It was interesting hearing Michelle describe some of the reasons why books - and library catalog data - was a good candidate as an indicator:

Book publication is linked to changes in knowledge (consider the appearance of manuals, how-to books, ...)
The timing is right: there is a good correspondence between the date of commercialization of a technology or process and the date of books published about it. This is supported by commercial interests of publishers in catching interest at the right time.
Library catalogs group books into subject classifications which can be useful for analysis purposes.

We will make the slides and audio of the presentation available soon. Some further details of the approach can be found in these publications:

Michelle Alexopoulos, "Read All About it!! What Happens Following a Technology Shock?" American Economic Review, forthcoming. Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 391 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/391.
Michelle Alexopoulos and Jon Cohen, "Volumes of Evidence--Examining Technical Change Last Century Through a New Lens." Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 392 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/392.
Michelle Alexopoulos and Jon Cohen, "Measuring Our Ignorance, One Book at a Time: New Indicators of Technical Change, 1909-1949" Journal of Monetary Economics 56 (4) (2009), 450-470. Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 349 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/349.

Incidentally, it was also quite interesting for OCLC colleagues to see an economist talk knowledgeably about the MARC format ;-)

All the news ...

2010-01-31T04:01:18Z

My former OCLC colleague Eric Hellman has become one of the more interesting bloggers in our space. A little while ago he wrote about the acquisition of Liblime by PTFS. He made a general opening comment ...:

The library industry has likewise been troubled by misalignment of interests between the owners of the companies and their customers. That's why it's important for libraries to pay close attention to the frequent mergers and acquisitions of the companies that serve them. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League]

And goes on to talk about the rationale for open source (primarily to avoid vendor lock-in, Eric argues) and PTFS and Liblime positions in the market.

Here, for example, he talks about aspects of the library/vendor transaction from the vendor perspective ...

From the vendor's point of view, the sales process is very expensive. Promises to customize the system to address customer peculiarities are common, and these add to the cost of system maintenance. Once the system has been sold, a proprietary system vendor has a guarantee of continuing profits from support contracts. Only the vendor has the system knowledge (and sometimes even the system access) to make even the most trivial changes. It's in the support phase that the vendor and customer interests can become misaligned. The vendor has every incentive to do the least work at the highest price possible. The customer is locked into whatever system they have chosen. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League]

.... and here he talks about open source ..

The recent popularity of open source library management systems is in large part a search for business models that better align the interests of vendor and customer during the support phase. If the support vendor doesn't perform to the library's expectations, the library can hire a new support vendor without ditching their automation system. If a library wants to add a new feature to their system, or integrate it with a system from another vendor, they can hire a developer based on qualifications rather than access to source. The important thing to the library is not so much the access to source or the cost of the license, it's the absence of vendor lock-in. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League]

The entry was informative and interesting. I may disagree with detail or emphasis (other factors are clearly in play in the current interest in open source for example) but - importantly - my thinking has been influenced by it.

When I finished reading it I was also struck by how unusual it is to read something like this in the sources where you might expect it, in the library 'journalism'. In general we are not well-served by library journalism (I am thinking of what is published in our 'trade magazines': American Libraries, Library Journal, CILIP Update, ...) when it comes to this type of 'business' analysis. Our discussions are poorer for it.

Talking to people

2010-01-25T03:19:22Z

I am interviewed occasionally for a report somebody is preparing. Sometimes internal, not for publication, sometimes published. It is always interesting when reading the final outcome to see how and whether my comments were included.

My experiences vary. Sometimes I am pleased to see an appropriate trace of the conversation; sometimes I can see no evidence that I was ever spoken to; and sometimes comments are assimilated to a view that I did not really have.

Not unsurprisingly, people are variably good at listening. Sometimes a comment will be enlisted in support of a view the interviewer had. Although, I haven't kept track I don't think that people inside the library community are necessarily more faithful interpreters than those from outside.

What is surprising - to me anyway - is the number of interviewers in situations like this who like to answer their own questions, or who, in response to the slightest prompt, are keen to talk about experiences on their previous assignments. In my experience, they tend not to produce great reports.

Comments

2010-01-21T22:22:53Z

Apologies to commenters - we had some hiccups. Some were delayed and a couple may have been lost. We will try not to do it again ...

Reconfigurations

2010-01-16T23:02:47Z

Readers will have noted recently that I have been interested in reputation management and impact, and in how libraries may support institutional goals in these areas. In this context I was interested to read the following in a thoughtful reflection on future directions for research libraries by Susan Gibbons:

Another shift in technical service in academic libraries will be towards the facilitation of discovery and access of locally created materials. The rising importance of open access and the growing acceptance of download counts as part of an academic's impact metric will cause higher education institutions to focus on achieving the widest possible distribution of their locally created content. Dissertations, articles, books, working papers, technical reports, and other such content will flood into the campus libraries for curation, description, and distribution. Technical service staff will find an increasing percentage of their work shifted away from the procurement of external content to the care and distribution of locally created content.

Another emerging need for the expertise of technical services staff in academic libraries will develop from the expanding importance of the gathering and maintenance of institutional metrics. The need for a higher education institution to demonstrate its impact on society and return on investment to its state, federal, foundation, and alumni donors will drive the coordination and consolidation of institutional data, such as publications, citations, and grant outputs. The library is a natural locus for such operations, in part as a service related to the institutional repository. [Time horizon 2020: Library renaissance PDF]

I was also interested in Susan's emphasis on new forms of collaborative sourcing.

Ironically, I think the Google Book Settlement will cause a resurgence in the use of the current print collections of libraries as users discover content that was hidden by the difference between searching a full-text index and a MARC record. As these books are rediscovered, there will be a shifting of resources in technical services towards the identification, preservation, and some level of republication of books held uniquely by each library. Regional collaborations around the identification and preservation of last copies, shared off-site storage, and cooperative collection development will open doors towards more formalized sharing of regional skills, infrastructure, and resources. I believe academic libraries will model partnerships which their academic institutions will later need to follow as higher education as a whole retrenches through economic and demographic necessity. [Time horizon 2020: Library renaissance PDF]

This has also been a topic of interest in these pages. As libraries begin to think about their collective collection and its collaborative management in more focused ways, the balance between local provision , shared provision in offsite storage, and digital availability in GBS or Hathi Trust will become a major focus of service and policy attention.

Outside-in and inside-out

2010-01-11T19:11:26Z

An 'industry' pattern appears to have emerged which builds a discovery layer over resources available from the library (or from a group library service, at the level of a state or a consortium for example).

Three characteristics come to mind. First, there is an attempt to provide an integrated discovery experience over multiple resource types/workflows: bought materials (books, CDs, etc), licensed materials (A&I databases, ejournals, etc), and institutional digital materials (digitised special collections, for example, or repositories of learning and research materials). Second, this 'horizontal' discovery layer is separated from the 'vertical' management systems which may manage those resources: the 'integrated' library system, the variety of systems which manage licensed resources, repository infrastructure, and so on. And, third, API access may be provided.

Various issues are being addressed as this model becomes more common. One that is interesting, I think, is that it will show how the three categories of resource I mention above - bought, licensed, and digital - have quite different dynamics in our systems and services.

Think, for example, of a distinction between outside-in resources, where the library is buying or licensing materials from external providers and making them accessible to a local audience (e.g. books and journals), and 'inside-out' resources which may be unique to an institution (e.g. digitized images, research materials) where the audience is both local and external. Thinking about an external non-institutional audience, and how to reach it, poses some new questions for the library.

Or think about the relationship between the 'locally available' collection and the 'universal' collection in each case.

* For bought materials (books, CDs, ...) the library provides access to the locally available collection - the materials acquired for local use - and then may provide access to a broader 'universal' collection through Worldcat or another resource.

* For licensed materials, access is first through the broader 'universal' level (in various databases) before checking for the subsect of locally available materials.

* For institutional digital materials, access is provided to local repositories but this will not typically be backed up by access to a 'universal' source for such materials (although, one can see attempts to do this, as, for example, where an institutional repository expands a search to Scirus).

Of course, if one thinks about other discovery/disclosure channels (Google, for example), these three collection types also behave differently. That is a topic for another blog entry though.

Digital content quarterly

2010-01-07T02:10:45Z

Digital Content Quarterly is a new publication from the Strategic Content Alliance.

In this fast-paced, ever-changing environment the Strategic Content Alliance's Digital Content Quarterly (DCQ) provides a news round-up of digital content issues from around the world, thought-provoking features highlighting key debates in the field and regular columns from leading digital content experts in areas that have most traction in terms of digital content provision: intellectual property rights and business modelling and sustainability. The quarterly is also interactive, complete with video interviews of features and 'top tip' guides as well as a vibrant new design. [Digital Content Quarterly]

The video inserts are a nice feature, although as with many publications produced for printing it is difficult to read on the web.

It was interesting reading through fifteen or so pages on digitization and digital content services which only had a couple of small references to Google Book Search ;-)

Reputational survey

2010-01-06T12:34:41Z

As university rankings attract more attention and as national/regional policy discussions continue about whether and how to concentrate research excellence, Thompson Reuters have provided a little more detail about their plans to work with Times Higher Education to develop their own framework to support university profiling and ranking.

Our aim with the Global Institutional Profiles Project, which includes our work with Times Higher Education's World University Rankings, is to develop a data source that provides the best informed and most effective resource to build profiles of universities and research-based institutions around the world. The Profiles Project will create data-driven portraits of globally significant research institutions, combining peer review, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels, and faculty characteristics in one comprehensive database. Thomson Reuters also brings a celebrated legacy of data transparency to the Profiles Project, operating with clear methodology and data gathering practices. [Global institutional profiles project]

They announce their 'reputational survey', to be sent to a selection of researchers soliciting evaluation of institutions active in their research area. This will provide one stream of data among several. Another will be citation data from Web of Science, styled the "gold standard in research indexing".

Potentially, this is an important initiative given the influence of adopted metrics on behavior. Appropriate metrics continue to be the subject of debate (see for example the program of this NSF-sponsored meeting on scholarly metrics) of serious interest to research and science policy and funding bodies, as well as to institutions themselves.

Europeana

2010-01-04T04:53:48Z

My colleague Ricky Erway bravely accepted the challenge to talk as an outsider on the challenges faced by Europeana to a European conference on digitization last year. Her remarks are recorded in an article in the LIBER Quarterly.

The organisers of the second LIBER/EBLIDA workshop on digitisation (The Hague, October 19-21) asked Ricky Erway of OCLC to provide a view on Europeana from the US perspective. Erway accepted the invitation with some hesitation, as she was well aware that Europeana is still in its infancy. Her remarks, as reproduced below, were received by her audience as they were intended: as one person's observations at a particular point in the Europeana timeline. But as she drew on her twenty-year experience in related projects and activities, her observations are well worth the attention of Europeana staff and stakeholders. [A view on Europeana from the US perspective]

Where are the numbers? The impact of the economic recession on university library and IT services

2010-01-04T03:51:14Z

'The impact of the economic recession on university library and IT services' [pdf] is a report by market research company Ipsos Mori for several UK higher education organizations. A summary and a briefing paper are also available.

It documents possible approaches to cost saving based on interviews with librarians and directors of ICT services. I was slightly surprised at the bullish tone in the opening sentences of this headline statement about libraries:

One thing is clear: most librarians we spoke to are not yet feeling the 'pinch' of the recession on their services. There is a clear sense that the library occupies a protected place as the 'beating heart' of the institution and most feel the impact of the recession has currently been contained to small, easily managed budget cuts - for now. At the same time, however, there is a sense of vulnerability and a growing concern that libraries may be seen as an easy target for savings and efficiencies whenever required by the institution (given their book funds are typically the largest concentration of uncommitted funds within the University budget) while they struggle to meet ever changing student and academic staff service demands. [The impact of the economic recession on university library and IT services PDF]

Especially as the summary spoke about "an acute sense" of vulnerability.

It notes 'solutions' under the following headings: self-service, consortia, renegotiating contracts and planning subscriptions, shared services and outsourced services, library staff, monitoring satisfaction and impact on students. I didn't notice much discussion of the report when it appeared (September 2009) but I doubt that anybody was very surprised by very much that they read in it.

There are a couple of recommendations in the Foreword by JISC which seem a little ahead of practice. For example, it is suggested that among the opportunities that "are at universities' disposal to realise efficiencies and cost savings" is the adoption by HE library consortia of shared Library Management Systems (LMS). It is also suggested that open access "should help mitigate increased costs in journal subscriptions". Neither of these is likely to be an immediate source of cost savings given the current state of play, whatever about the longer term.

However, in reading the report I became increasingly aware of a strange gap, particularly in a report prepared by a market research company. There are hardly any numbers. There is discussion of downturn, of shifting investment, of trends - but hardly anywhere is there an attempt to quantify these. Above all, I wondered if there were a sense of how big the discussed budget cuts were likely to be. This may be institution-specific, but without a sense of scale the whole discussion had a sense of unreality.

VIAF design pattern

2010-01-03T19:02:59Z

A blog entry by Paul Walk - An infrastructure service anti-pattern - drew some attention a while ago. He argues against a model in which a service provider independently develops APIs and a user interface, and in which, accordingly, the APIs are developed in advance of actual use or explicit external requirements. He claims that this model underlies aspects of historic UK higher education thinking, where application to application interoperability was seen as a good in itself and was often built into initiatives from the start in mistaken anticipation of hypothetical future use.

His alternative suggestion is that an API should be developed in tandem with real requirements generated by the user-facing application supporting user interfaces. This motivates the API with real requirements and strengthens the chances of being able to support third party application developers who want to write to the API. He suggests a refinement of this approach as follows:

An interesting alternative to this is the approach of combining the user-facing web pages and the machine-actionable API into one interface, through embedded RDFa for example:

It remains to be seen how this approach is going to work out over time, but we have seen hints of simpler approaches to combining user and machine interfaces in the past, such as RSS being styled to give a decent human-readable interface, or earlier attempts to do interesting things with XHTML. [An infrastructure service anti-pattern]

I left a note suggesting that VIAF and Worldcat Identities were architected along the lines of this last picture. For VIAF details, for example, see Thom's posts here and here. Several interfaces - OpenSearch, linked data, user-oriented - are supported by an underlying SRU interface. Here is Paul's response, noted here with his permission:

I’m fascinated to see that VIAF merges the human/machine interfaces in two ways:

a machine-centric, but with a human-readably styled version if accessed from a browser

and

a human-centric, get the machine view with a little addition to the URL approach here

the second of which is, in turn, also styled for human consumption if accessed from a browser.

Institutional researcher pages: an example

2010-01-03T02:39:52Z

I have written a couple of times recently (here and here) about institutional and indvidual reputation management.

Think, for example, of faculty profiles: the managed disclosure of expertise and research activity. This has often been an informal personal or departmental activity. However, there is now a variety of institutional initiatives which may pull together data about expertise, experience, publications, grants, courses taught, and so on (see OSU Pro at OSU, or Vivo at Cornell, for example). Such initiatives may sit between between several organizational units on campus: Research Support, PR/Communications, IT, Library. They are also at the intersection of different systems: enterprise (Peoplesoft, for example), course lists, research/grants management, bibliographic. At the same time, researchers may have presences in emerging network level research social networks (Mendeley or Nature Network for example), in disciplinary resources (Repec, for example), and, of course, in general use services (Linkedin, for example). There are also commercial services which support such activity in different ways, Community of Science or Symplectic for example. [Reputation enhancement]

The Scholars Hub is the institutional repository at Hong Kong University. It has recently been enhanced with author pages which pull data from several sources including:

Name & Contact Details: HKU Communications Directory
Picture & Biography: Departmental web pages
Media Spokesmanship: HKU Communications & Public Affairs Office
Metrics: Scopus & ISI ResearcherID
Open access outputs: HKU Scholars' Hub.

Each is harvested from its source silo and integrated to form an author profile. In a recent presentation [ppt] about the approach, University Librarian Tony Ferguson and David Palmer describe how researchers can control their own page, and emphasise the incentives for contribution in the context of an overall alignment with the university mission of 'knowledge exchange' (KE). KE is defined on the presentation splash page: "The HKU definition of KE includes the act of making HKU generated knowledge and skill sets accessible to business, government and the community." They suggest that the pages give authors a valuable service and point to success in search engine retrieval. For an example, see (click on the image to see the full page):

The service also attempts to bring together different versions of author names. They assign a unique local identifier to each researcher, which is in the page URL (rp00026 in the above example).

The bibliometrics section is in preparation for the HKU annual Performance Reviews, and the Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise.

(Thanks to Tony Ferguson and David Palmer for a note on the work supporting this initiative.)

Related entries:

How to repost?

2009-12-29T13:02:37Z

I 're-posted' my entry on the 'two ways of Web 2.0' the other day. On the site, I now have a page for the original entry and for the 're-post'.

I have just 're-posted' another entry, but this time I chose to do it a different way. I changed the publish date to today's date, and noted the original date in a note.

I wondered which way was the better, and am not aware of any 'good practice' on this issue. It seems to me that newspapers sometimes adopt the latter practice. I notice that PersonaNonData, who occasionally reposts earlier entries, seems to follow the former.

It is interesting to run into this versioning question in a modest way here. I can see pros and cons of each approach and I am sure there is a relevant literature. Something to think about in the new year ....

Being friends with the librarian in the Bibliothèque National

2009-12-29T05:06:51Z

[I bring back this entry prompted by the selection of The Arcades Project in the series of canonical works in the Times Higher Education Supplement. It was originally published on July 13 2007.]

There is a passage in a letter from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno where he suggests removing a reference to Georges Bataille from a document. Bataille, in addition to his other accomplishments, was a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Benjamin writes:

And in this way my own relationship with Georges Bataille will not be adversely affected either, something I would like to maintain, both because of his assistance at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and because of my plans for naturalization. - The fragment would not escape his attention since the Institute journal is openly displayed in the reading room where he often works; and he is hardly the type of person to react serenely to its contents. [Theodor W Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The complete correspondence, 1928-1940. p. 276]

I was reminded of this passage as I read Jeremy Harding's discussion in the current London Review of Books of Walter Benjamin's 'last day' before his death in 1940 while trying to flee to the US.

Benjamin had left various papers, including the manuscript of his Arcades Project, with Bataille for safe-keeping. Bataille hid them in the library. The Arcades Project is a massive unfinished work, a weaving of quotations and Benjamin's own text.

So the library comes in at three levels. At one, it is important for the scholar to keep in with the librarian ;-) At a second, the librarian receives a manuscript on the eve of flight and keeps it safely in the library from where it is retrieved and published. At a third, is it possible to imagine a book which rests so much on quotations without the libraries which preserve the scholarly and cultural record the quotations point to and make it available to readers?

Related entries:

(Originally published July 13 2007. WC Identities URLs updated to current versions.)