Categories: Analytics and measurement• OCLC

I thought I would post some numbers here which were prepared by my colleague Brian Lavoie for another purpose. The question was: how many of the books in US libraries are in English?

First of all, what is a book? Deciding what a book is involves some choices (are theses in or out, for example?). This analysis uses the definition of 'print books' given in the Google 5 analysis published in DLib Magazine a while back [1].

a. All of WorldCat (Apr 09):
135.3 million records
Cataloged as "eng": 46 percent (so 54 percent non-English)

b. Print books only (Apr 09):
91.2 million
Cataloged as: "eng": 40 percent (so 60 percent non-English)

c. Print books in US libraries (Jan 09)
42.5 million
Cataloged as "eng": 57 percent (so 43 percent non-English)

d. Print books representing combined collections of three academic research libraries participating in GBS (April 2009):
7.2 million
Cataloged as: "eng": 54 percent (so 46 percent non-English)

Note - c is calculated on a slightly earlier version of the database as we had already pulled out US library holdings. The data in d is being looked at for another purpose: hence the slightly arbitrary selection of 3 libraries.

Note - these numbers are for records in the database, which represent 'manifestations' in FRBR terms. If one were to count holdings or actual copies the numbers would be different. The proportion of 'eng' would go up as English titles will be more widely held and in greater numbers of copies.

[1] Here is how the definition of a 'print book' was decided upon and operationalised for the Google 5 analysis. "Although there is no unambiguous bibliographic definition of a book, libraries have often used monographic language materials as a proxy for books, and this practice is adopted for this study. More specifically, in the context of a MARC21 record, a book is defined as a language-based monograph, identified by the codes "a" and "m" in bytes 6 and 7 of the leader, respectively. For the purposes of this study, theses/dissertations and government documents are excluded from the analysis, since these materials are usually acquired and managed as separate segments of the library collection. Records describing books in print format were identified by eliminating all non-print formats, such as digital, microform, Braille, and so on."

Categories: General - systems and technologies• Libraries - systems and technologies• User experience

Layar created a ripple of interest a while ago. It is yet to be released. It is an application for Android based phones which will allow data from various partner resources to be 'layered' over the view through a camera phone. Partners discussed include banks (for ATMs), realtors, and a social network site with data about venues. They describe it as an augmented reality application: objects viewed through the camera may be augmented by data about those objects.

Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world. [Sprxmobile - Layar]

[image: layar.eu via Tito Sierra M-Libraries 09 ppt]

Tito Sierra referenced Layar in his presentation about WolfWalk, project, at the Second M-Libraries Conference in Vancouver last week. WolfWalk is a pilot project at NCSU as I mentioned the other day. It is working on an iPod application which aims to create what Tito called a 'geomobile collection'. Here is what the project pages say:

A pilot project to create a mobile application that enables users to explore NC State campus history using a location-aware map-based interface. The application supports a map view (using Google Maps) with geotagged placemarks for approximately 60 major sites of interest on the NCSU campus, and a browse view for quickly locating a known site by name. Each site has several historical images associated with it that are sourced from NCSU Special Collections Research Center digital archives. [WolfWalk]

Tito discussed how they thought this would be of interest to alumni and was careful to describe it as a modest proof-of-concept. I thought it succeeded very well in demonstrating his contention that the challenge is not just to provide small-screen versions of digital collections but to leverage the capabilities of new mobile technologies to provide new ways of experiencing those collections. In this case, the collections augment the experience of the buildings on campus by providing historic context at the point of interaction; at the same time, the app provides a map-based approach to digital collections.

The screencast and powerpoint presentation are well worth a look. The WolfWalk pictures above are screenshots of the screencast.

Mlib09

Categories: General - systems and technologies• Libraries - systems and technologies

I traveled home from the 2nd M-Libraries Conference in UBC, Vancouver, yesterday. I was interested to come across several relevant news stories in the reading materials I had bought en route: The Globe and Mail, The Economist (last week's, as it turns out), and The Financial Times. This underlined the topicality of the conference themes.

The iPhone was prominent at the conference, in discussion, but also in practice as they were slipped in and out of pockets and bags throughout. In an interesting presentation about their WolfWalk project, Tito Sierra of NCSU opened with some general remarks about geo-location and touch screens as distinctive capacities supporting new applications. He also reminded people of the importance of the Apple Apps store in reducing transaction costs for users: search and acquisition of apps was now straightforward. What Apple has done is to create a network of developers around its successful platform. The App Store is key to this as it allows app developers to find users, and users to find apps, and in the process the value of the iPhone/iTouch is increased. This point was reinforced in a story about Apple's success in countering the effects of the current downturn in the Financial Times. John Gapper quotes work by Hagel and Seely Brown of Deloitte which shows that lower costs of entry brought about by regulatory and technical trends are creating stronger competitive challenges for companies. Apple's ability to resist this trend depends on the way in which it has created a platform around which a network of partners has built thousands of apps. So, for the Palm Pre to be successful, for example, it not only has to compete with the iPhone on price and features, but also on its ability to become a platform for app developers. Much of the value of the iPhone now derives from the apps which are available to its users.

I was also struck by the number of Mlib09 delegates who were using netbooks. I suppose you would expect this at such a conference, but this did not make it any less striking. The Economist had an article on netbooks, focusing on their challenge to the computer and software industry generally. They report Gartner figures that 21M netbooks will ship this year, twice as many as last year, accounting for more than 15% of the laptop market. By the end of 2008, netbook pioneer Asus had sold nearly 5M Eees. I was interested to read that Microsoft was heavily discounting Windows XP to netbook providers to counter the Linux challenge. Acer and other firms plan to use Android.

One of the hits of the conference was the discussion by Kate Robinson of the use of QR Codes in the catalog at the University of Bath (blogged here earlier this year). It prompted discussion of the variety of ways in which people and materials could be tied into the network.

The Globe and Mail had several stories about capturing data from codes.

• Databars. A discussion of the use of Databars, smaller than barcodes, in retail and supply-chain operations.
• Samplesaint: a story about how this company, which creates digital media for cell phones, now distributes discount coupons for redemption by on-screen scanning at the checkout. Coupons can be received in various ways, including in response to an on-the-spot request by texting a number found on the relevant shelf.
• There is also a general discussion of the use of cell phones as payment devices.

Interestingly, these were opposite an advert for IBM (featuring a barcode image) which promoted its ability to make supply chains smarter and more efficient.

Categories: OCLC• RLG Partnership• User experience

The presentations from the 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Symposium: Hearing voices: connecting with users, enhancing services, are now available.

Here is how the event was described ..

User studies have become a critical component in developing and improving services in our institutions. However, investigations into the needs of users and potential users are expensive and time consuming. This event oriented attendees to the importance of user studies, highlighted findings from recent projects of interest and utility to the RLG Partnership, and laid the groundwork for future collaboration. [2009 Symposium agenda]

I was interested to read Arnold Arcolio's account of user selection on several Worldcat Local implementations. Arnold works for the User Experience Group at OCLC.

See the notes about usability and the symposium from me and from Jim at HangingTogether.

Categories: Knowledge organization and representation

Terry Eagleton said somewhere that Raymond Williams was a librarian's nightmare, meaning presumably that his work crossed academic boundaries and resisted easy classification. Let's have a look using the Classify prototype.

The prototype provides access to more than 36 million WorldCat records that contain Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) numbers, Library of Congress Classification (LCC) numbers, or National Library of Medicine (NLM) Classification numbers.

The records are grouped using the OCLC FRBR Work-Set algorithm resulting in a work-level summary of the class numbers assigned a title. You can retrieve a classification summary by ISBN, ISSN, UPC, OCLC number, or author/title. [About Classify]

OK, so here is what happens with The Country and the City, maybe the one of his works most likely still to be read. It leans to literature, history, sociology ...

Here is Keywords ...

And here is an early work, The Long Revolution ...

There is quite a bit that could be said here. It would be interesting to explore what the pattern of classification might reveal about intellectual trends or cross-disciplinary work. I will limit myself here to saying that it looks as if Eagleton may be right some of the time ;-)

Categories: Books, movies and reading ...• ebooks and other e-resources

I have just read M-Libraries: Information use on the move: a report from the Arcadia Programme [pdf] by Keren Mills.

It provides an overview of recent trends in 'mobilized' library services, library services which use mobile communications. It reports the results of a survey of library users about their preferences and makes some recommendations for library services.

I was interested to read the following:

These results suggest it is not worth libraries putting development resource into delivering content such as eBooks and e-journals to mobile devices at present. EBooks are already accessible via some mobile phones, such as iPhones and Windows Mobile devices, and audio files such as podcasts and audio books can easily be played on many mobile phones or portable media players. At present, however, most users are put off by the constraints of the technology, such as poor screen quality. iPhone users are already more inclined to read eBooks on their phones, according to comments from the respondents to this survey. [M-Libraries: Information use on the move: a report from the Arcadia Programme pdf]

In the time when this report was being prepared we have seen major developments in the consumer ebook space. There has been discussion of Google Editions, new releases of the Kindle, and a variety of reading applications (e.g. Stanza, Eucalyptus), and several companies are working to provide various reading options.

One reason for this is given in the note above: the iPhone, and now other smartphones which are trying to compete, has made reading more congenial.

In this context, I wonder what sort of response Keren would get if she were to repeat her survey in, say, 3 years time.

Incidentally, Mike Shatzkin has an interesting presentation about the future of books here, given recently at Book Expo 2009.

Categories: Identity management, IPR and e-commerce• Personal

The Facebook username landgrab created a flurry of excitement over the weekend. Individuals 'claimed' their piece of network real estate in the form of a Facebook URL, and organizations had an opportunity to protect registered marks. I am now

http://www.facebook.com/lorcand

which chimes with my recently established Twitter presence

http://www.twitter.com/lorcand

I decided to consolidate on lorcand a little while ago, when I switched from the more opaque lisld on Twitter. Of course, this was late in my online life, meaning that - as most others do - I have a fractured online identity: it is pretty decentralized. I feel that I ought to more actively adopt some centering strategies (see below) but it never gets to the top of the list.

I am prompted by this experience to incorporate here a post of last year - centering the decentralised identity - which is still relevant ...

Andy Powell, network resident, has an interesting post about his 'fractured' network identity. How does he define identity?

"Digital identity is the online representation of an individual within a community, as adopted by that individual and/or projected by others. An individual may have multiple digital identities in multiple communities." [Andy Powell, eFoundations]

He describes how his digital identity is 'fractured' across many environments (FaceBook, Flickr, various home pages and blogs, Second Life, twitter, etc). Various professional or personal affiliations are explicitly visible in several 'friendspaces' (my word), on FaceBook and Twitter for example. Andy even confesses to an 'identity crisis' around his second life identity, Art Fossett.

I also have something of an identity crisis around Art Fossett - specifically concerning how closely the digital identities of Andy Powell and Art Fossett should be related. [eFoundations: define:digital identity]

Reading the entry, it seemed to me that Andy is talking about 'centering' this 'decentralized identity' in various ways: he talks about wanting to 'consolidate' his network presence.

(John Breslin schematically represents decentralized identity in a blog entry of some time ago.)

There are various centering or consolidating strategies ...

Andy talks about limiting the number of 'handles' his identity has - email addresses and user names, although he is not in a position where his personal identities can override his current work identity (at Eduserv).

He is working to center his network presence at http://andypowe11.net/ and has some interesting comments about steps taken or to be taken. These include the suggestion that his former place of work put redirects from historically superseded network presences to his current one so that he can capture their 'Google juice', which raises interesting questions about our view of the historical record on the web.

He also has some advice about the use of third party services, about control of domain names, and about where you build up 'google juice' as moving it may be outside of your control.

Several things struck me reading this post ...

• Andy's concerns here are probably in advance of most people's, but it seems clear that managing our network presences and the relationships between them is becoming of more interest. And this cuts across previous boundaries - between work, family and friends, for example - in different ways.
• My network identity is less decentralized than Andy's: overall, I am less residential ;-) Until recently, I would have seen this 'fracture' as simply a part of an ongoing transition into new ways of doing things. And I wouldn't have had the patience or the inclination to adopt various centering strategies. That said, I have been more conscious recently of where I want my network presence to be 'signed' and where I don't. To take an example close to home, I wrote some longish reviews on items in Worldcat; recently, I realised that I would like the system to be able to support in some way my assertion that I was their author, and now it does by linking to a profile page. I have tended to use lisld as a handle in a variety of places. Now, I would probably more consistently use something like LorcanDempsey where I was more concerned about 'signature', although I am quite attached to lisld ;-)
• Of course, Google is a strong bottom-up centering service (see Tony Hirst's interesting suggestion that an institution's de facto home page is the first page of Google results in a search for that institution). My first-page Google results tend to be dominated by this blog, but there are also current and previous work pages, some articles come and go, and more recently Wikipedia and Facebook make a showing. None of these is at a domain name controlled by me. This blog was established as an internal OCLC communications tool for a year before it was externalised so it is 'located' at OCLC (in several ways). Now, I am sure that it gets a ranking 'lift' from the OCLC domain name, but it also means that I cannot bring it with me as it now stands if I ever leave. In a sense, I lose some of that network capital. Of course this is quite reasonable from another view, but it does raise interestingly the balance between individual and institution.
• My name is not unique. However, it is not very common. Andy notes his 'Google nemesis', Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash. It would be interesting to know more about what the impact of findability in Google has been on the naming of children.
• Now, I know that there are various initiatives underway which may make our identities more portable. I assume - hope - that we will end up with the ability to port our identities flexibly, but that we also retain the ability to support decentralised identities which may not know very much, or anything, about each other ;-)

[Original post: centering the decentralized identity]

Categories: Economics• Marketing• Metadata• OCLC• Standards

One of the recommendations of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control was that ways should be found of harnessing publisher data upstream of the cataloging process. The rationale was that this would make data about materials available earlier and reduce overall creation effort.

OCLC recently organized an invitational symposium which had this issue as a central topic. The report is an interesting set set of notes from the different perspectives of the multiple players involved. It discusses current practices and incentives to do things differently.

In a follow-on activity to the LC report, R2 Consulting are mapping the flow of MARC records in North American. The symposium notes say: "This list of distributors is much larger than originally anticipated and consists of a very diverse group of entities."

And, as I discussed the other day, the Research Information Network has published a report about UK practices, Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world [Splash page; pdf], which also recommends greater re-use of records across the publishing and library worlds.

So, there certainly seems to be a convergence of interest here. Indeed, the potential benefits of such sharing have been a topic of discussion for many years. For example, at the OCLC Symposium, Brian Green, Executive Director of the International ISBN Agency, and I reminisced about UK initiatives to we had been party almost, gulp, twenty years ago to try to create the conditions for an 'all-through' system of bibliographic record exchange between the various players in the bookworld.

Now, clearly quite a lot has happened and as R2 reported above data flows through many parties. And publisher data does flow into CIP, and into various organizations which support libraries. Amazon has done much to underline the importance to publishers of having book metadata to support a variety of operations. That said, the renewed emphasis on publisher-library data flow, certainly from the library side, suggests that much more might be done.

Why has more not happened to promote the flow of metadata through the system, from publishers to libraries? Three things occur ...

First, there is the mechanical issue of data exchange. Onix has now emerged as a shared approach to disseminating publisher data. However, it is interesting reading the remarks about Onix in the report of the OCLC Symposium. Netlibrary reports that 10% of publishers supply data in ONIX, representing 50% of the supplied content. NLM also reported that 10% of publishers supply Onix, but that these account for 80% of materials catalogued at NLM. There were also lots of comments about the consistency of Onix data. However, one would expect improved technical apparatus to support data flow, not create the need for it.

This prompts the second question: what incentives exist and are they aligned across the system? Historically, metadata may have been created for different purposes. Publishers had an interest in the supply chain, and libraries an interest in inventory control. There may be a shared interest in discovery, but it has been approached differently in each area. In fact, one library interest is a recognition that more descriptive material (table of contents, summary, etc) is in fact very useful for users of their catalogs and other systems even though they have not historically made it a part of their catalog data. There may also be an interest in getting basic descriptive data earlier, to allow more time to be spent on other parts of record creation. What incentives exist for publishers to make data available to libraries? Amazon, and other agents in the supply chain, provide an incentive to make appropriate metadata available to support discovery and sales. Data is supplied for CIP purposes. Are there additional incentives? One may be to have enriched metadata flow back to publishers. Are there incentives here which are strong enough for a framework to emerge within which there is greater flow?

And third, related to this, and probably most important, is that the incentives on either side have not been strong enough to encourage organizations to develop services in this area which would make the flow a reality.

Of course, the reason that OCLC hosted the Symposium mentioned above is that it is now looking at whether it is sensible to begin providing such services. It is doing this in its 'next generation cataloging' program.

OCLC has launched a pilot project to explore upstream metadata capture and enhancement using publisher and vendor ONIX metadata. Pilot partners from the publishing, vendor and library communities are assisting us in this effort. We hope the pilot will result in ongoing processes for the early addition of new title metadata to WorldCat and enhanced quality and consistency in upstream title metadata used by multiple channels. [Next generation cataloging]

Update: In response to query, see here for more information about how OCLC can work with publishers and here for how OCLC works with book vendors to deliver cataloging data.

Postscript: The conversation with Brian Green prompted me to look up various pieces I wrote at the time which reflected some of the discussion we remembered. (I note that while I have difficulty opening Word files from that time, the RTF file is still readable.)

• Publishers and libraries: an all-through system for bibliographic data?
  International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control. 20 (3), July/September, 1991, 37-41.
  RTF: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/ukoln/dempsey-1991-01/ubcim.rtf
• Users' requirements of bibliographic records: publishers, booksellers, librarians.
  ASLIB Proceedings, 42 (2), February 1990, 61-69. [Worldcat.org]
• Bibliographic records: use of data elements in the book world. Bath: Bath University Library, 1989. ISBN 0861970853 [Worldcat.org]

Categories: RLG Partnership• User experience

I was interested to see that MIT Libraries have a public page with links to various usability results. I thought it was quite interesting, and that, while acknowledging some local flavor, it might be useful if more libraries shared results in this way.

More generally, we know that there are a lot of local user study activities the results of which would be of interest to others.

There was some discussion of the benefits of such sharing at the 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Symposium: Hearing voices: connecting with users, enhancing services. (Presentations available soon.)

Jim builds on that discussion in a post over on HangingTogether ...

My screenagers aren't fundamentally different from your screenagers. My graduate students aren't fundamentally different from your graduate students. My students and faculty don't do their work in a fundamentally different way then yours. My clients expectations and use of a local library catalog are not fundamentally different than yours. Why would we imagine that the willingness to go beyond the first page of results in a catalog search is going to differ by institution? If we can accept that there is a system-wide relevance to these studies then we are well on the way to a shareable profile of our different client segments (academic/public, undergrad/graduate, casual user, etc.). We're well along on having a broad foundation on which to do further work that is more closely aligned with the distinctive services and impact that the library can have. [HangingTogether]

He goes on to make some interesting remarks about understanding users and their desire to connect with each other.

Related entries:

• A signed network presence: people as entry points again
• Some thoughts about egos, objects, and social networks

Categories: Featured• Libraries - distributed environments• Libraries - organization and services• Metadata• ebooks and other e-resources

The Research Information Network in the UK has released a timely report: Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world [Splash page; pdf]. It is concise and has a useful Summary and Key Findings section.

I found it an interesting read, in no small part because it rehearses various key themes of these pages. Critically, it discusses systemwide reconfiguration of library services, a far-reaching and critical issue for libraries in a network environment.

There are two overarching issues. One is that library processes are inefficient because resources are consumed in redundant activity that do not create distinctive local value. The second is that a fragmented presence on the web reduces impact and visibility. Of course each of these is related to the institutional-scale nature of much current work, which is poorly aligned with emerging network organization, where we have become accustomed to institutions externalizing activities. The network allows routine work to be consolidated (think payroll) and it favors concentrated user hubs (think Amazon and Google).

So, from a processing point of view it is not surprising to see recommendations which point to better sharing of the burden of data creation across the book/journal world and between libraries (and in this context, there is a discussion of record re-use and innovation). And from an impact point of view, there are recommendations about consolidating the web presence of libraries in order to better focus user attention.

Perhaps the recommendation which will receive the most attention is the following:

Libraries are therefore spending significant resources in editing the records they receive, as well as adding data to meet their own local needs. Sustaining and developing individual catalogues for the more than 160 university libraries in the UK demands considerable resources. A shared catalogue for the whole UK higher education (HE) sector, with dynamic links to local holdings, could bring enormous benefits, in terms of reduced costs, of a more comprehensive coverage of both national and local holdings with better-quality records. It would also provide the potential for developing new user-focused services allowing them to remain relevant to their users and to compete with Amazon, Google and others.

I guess I would not emphasise competition in this way, as one of the functions of such a concentration (noted elsewhere in the report) would be to act as a switch and syndication point on the network.

The report has sensible recommendations about better provision of e-book data; it argues for better dissemination of article level data; and it supports various consensus making activities. I was surprised not to see more discussion of knowledgebase/ERM activity, although this may have been out of scope. This is especially because this is also an area with some potential for consolidation and network concentration.

I will watch with interest how this report is received and discussed. I think that it is inevitable that libraries will externalize more of what they do to third parties and shared services. This is both to increase efficiency and to increase impact. This does not remove the local role, rather it represents a natural evolution in which time and attention can be devoted to changing local needs and interests.

Update: The report does not provide a blueprint for action. It does put a stake in the ground which may shift the conversation.

Categories: Analytics and measurement• Books, movies and reading ...• OCLC

I have written about the Audience Level measure in these pages a few times. 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]]

The audience level is used in Worldcat Identities pages. It is also used in various internal processing activities where data of a certain type is required, for example where we are asked to share data about 'academic' materials. Check it out here.

My colleagues carried out an evaluation a while ago to see how closely this algorithmic approach based on holdings patterns matched human judgments. Their results were published in JASIST last year.

Edward T. O'Neill, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Timothy J. Dickey. Estimating the audience level for library resources. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Volume 59, Issue 13, Pages 2042-2050. 2008 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20908 subscription resource]

The team first examined a randomly generated sample of books from a research library, and the results looked promising. They then proceeded to a more formal test.

The second test compared the rankings of the audience level against ranking decisions made by human subjects. A sample of 30 books was ranked by each of 21 test participants, and a set of test rankings was created for each of the books. The test collection consisted of a stratified sample of 30 books from WorldCat. The books were all in the field of zoology, published in the year 2004, and representative of the entire spectrum of audience-level rankings.

And the result ...

The conclusion is that there exists a significant correlation between the human subjects' ranking and the audience-level rankings. The most important result of this test is the indication that the audience level and human subjects' perceptions are strongly correlated.

Leading them to conclude ..

The audience level is a valuable aid in identifying the appropriate resources for a particular audience. The algorithm produced audience-level values that were consistent with those of human evaluators as demonstrated both by the analysis of the actual books and by the comparison of the algorithmic results to those of a test group of human subjects. Based on the findings of this research, the audience level can be seen as a new tool with the potential to improve information relevance for discovery and selection for collection analysis, readers' advisory, and reference services.

Categories: Miscellaneous• Social networking

After many years of traveling without much incident I left a couple of things on planes recently. They never showed up, but It was a bit of a pain inquiring about them. It occurred to me that this was an application that lent itself to something of a crowdsourced approach, or at least to some form of shared network space, where the airline, the affected passenger, and potentially other passengers, could share information about lost items.

Or maybe not ...

I thought of this when I saw this tweet earlier from Jeni's Ice Creams here in Columbus ...

Just found a wallet in front of the Grandview Ave shop... Maybe RT so we can get it back to its rightful owner. Thanks! [jenisicecream]

Nice gesture. Nice use of Twitter. I hope it works.

Categories: Libraries - systems and technologies• Metadata• Search

I got a note from Debbie Campbell, Director, Collaborative Services, at the National Library of Australia the other week about their new prototype discovery service.

The service is available at http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/ and provides integrated access to over 42 million metadata and text resources from a range of the National Library's collaborative services and from elsewhere. For this initial version there are a range of data sources including: the Australian National Bibliographic Database, Australian Newspapers, Picture Australia, the ARROW Discovery Service, Pandora. The new service will also provide the discovery interface for the People Australia initiative. Additionally we have included some external sources of data such as OAIster, Open Library, the Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress tables of contents, publishers' descriptions and sample book chapters.

In leveraging off the collaborative approach the National Library takes with its discovery services, and in integrating results from across collections and formats, this new service will have distinct benefits for users. For example a researcher searching for images relating to "George Woodroffe Goyder" will also be presented with results relating to people, book, manuscript, map and newspaper results. This new approach presents major benefits to the researcher who, in the past, would have had to visit each discovery service in turn and conduct separate searches for the material they sought.

There is further information in the about pages.

I looked at the service and thought I would do a blog in a day or two. Suddenly then though there was a flurry of admiring comment, not least from my colleage Roy Tennant who reported ...

"We will now be going all out," Warwick Cathro of the NLA reported in an email to me this week, "to get additional content for this service such as (a) high level collection guides and finding aids from libraries and archives (b) oral history summaries and transcripts (c) metadata describing datasets, especially Australian social science data held by government or research data archives)." [One-stop searching with a can-do attitute]

This service brings together many individually innovative services to give a unified experience. I hope that NLA tracks how people use this service and what they think of it and let us know what they find out.

Categories: Libraries - systems and technologies• Libraries - distributed environments• Libraries - organization and services

The new prototype discovery service from the National Library of Australia caused a ripple of interest the other week when it was released. One reason for the interest is that it brings together access to a range of NLA resources (Picture Australia, Libraries Australia, and Pandora, among others) as well as to external resources (Oaister, for example). The rationale for this approach was outlined in an NLA report from two years ago. I will do an entry about the new service, but in the interim here is what I wrote about the report which argued for bringing the systems together in this way .....

The National Library of Australia has made an interesting report available, National Library of Australia IT Architecture Project Report, March 2007. [pdf] Here is the declared purpose:

The aim of this report is to define the IT architecture that will be needed to support the management, discovery and delivery of the National Library of Australia's collections over the next three years. The current architecture has allowed the library to develop a significant digital library capability over the last decade. Now the burden of maintaining and supporting existing systems and services is increasingly hindering us from bringing new services online, improving the user experience, exploring new ideas or responding to technological change. In the meantime, enormous changes are occurring in the broader environment.

The report identifies three major responses within the context of a new framework for digital library services (I talk about them in a different order than the one in which they are presented). One, it recommends a move to a service-oriented architecture. The grounds for this are clear, and clearly made in the report. They include the ability to share common services across applications, to be able to respond to change effectively, and to reduce over time the redundancy, cost and complexity of development.

Two, it argues for using open source solutions where they are 'functional and robust'. It notes an amendment to prior policy which favored a buy over a build policy. The Library will now consider open source solutions based on function and cost comparisons. The assessment of cost will not only include consideration of the direct costs of additional development but also the benefits of contributing code to the community and, interestingly, the opportunity costs of using commercial software whose development path is not aligned with library direction and need. The report notes the possibility of collaboratively sourcing some functionality with partners.

And three, the report talks about a 'single business' approach. This was the most interesting aspect of the document to me, because it underscores a major issue for libraries and the systems they deploy. This is that applications have developed in a piecemeal fashion over recent years, so that library operations are now supported by many applications, in different stages of maturity, and with different levels of process standardization. However, this ensemble of applications does not support efficient working across the range of library requirements, and inhibits flexible service development. Indeed, boundaries between these applications seem increasingly arbitrary, and to owe more to historic circumstance, and to the structure of the industry that has developed over time, than to current needs. Simply managing this diversity is a major task in itself. The ERAMS (electronic resource access and management services) discussion I mentioned a while ago is one symptom of a growing sense that the library systems landscape needs to be redefined.

The 'single business' approach is a recommendation that the library think in terms of a single 'business' and a single data corpus as part of its planning process, rather than in terms of separate planning for each service line or resource type (e.g. images, books, music). And that technical solutions be designed in ways that minimize the number of separate business applications that need to be developed. Of course, the service-oriented approach would facilitate the latter goal. In practice this would mean trying to streamline workflow across management environments for different resource types; using common delivery, rights management and other solutions; and developing a single integrated discovery environment across collections and resource types, which can be accessed through different views.

The report is well structured, and is worth reading as much as for its discussion of some general issues as it is for the particular National Library of Australia situation. .

[Original post]

Categories: RLG Partnership

I am pleased to note two recently released RLG Partnership reports.

• Schaffner, Jennifer. The Metadata is the Interface: Better Description for Better Discovery of Archives and Special Collections (.pdf: 190K/17 pp.)
• Smith-Yoshimura, Karen. Networking Names (.pdf: 135K/25 pp.)