panlibus

Panlibus has moved

2005-04-03T22:19:00.000Z

We're now hosting our own blogging site at Talis.

Panlibus continues at http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/

To help you stay tuned, here's the new location of the panlibus RSS feed: http://www.talis.com/blogs/panlibus/index.xml

Mobile Search - OpenSearch - RSS - Folksonomies - AJAX: When worlds collide

2005-04-01T12:26:00.000Z

Now there is a title to conjure with, what was drifting through my consciousness when that one formed out of the mist! Well in simple terms lots of stuff. More exactly lots of apparently disparate stuff that seems to naturally gravitate together:

RSS the now ubiquitous newsfeed protocol that underpins the Blogosphere, Podcasting, personalized Alerts, etc.etc.
OpenSearch A9's build of a self-described simply accessed 'standard' search API on top of RSS 2.0. A subject that I may just have mentioned over the last couple of weeks.
Mobile Search as thought through by Russell Beattie in his Web To Mobile Search posting, expanded on by Goobile.
Folksonomies as well discussed by Ken Chad
AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] All about JavaScript in the browser being used to bind together background XML data retrieval with dynamic display interaction. Take a look at Google Suggest, Google Maps, and flickr to see the effects.

So what's with the gravity then?

The Mobile Search discussion is based around the prediction that we will soon be carrying around the equivalent of a Web Server, full of contacts, info, photos, music, video, calendar, etc. in our pockets. With always on networks, it could behave like one.

To link everyone's pockets together [those that want to be anyway] is a classic folksonomy situation, with a dose of IM presence added in.

So how do I get to that info, or more importantly know it is there, or get alerted to change.

RSS, OpenSearch, and whatever they give birth to, that's how.

That vision needs some routing through central resources like A9 or Flickr or bloglines or a corporate MS Exchange server or del.icio.us or whatever. Those services will know about the stuff and where it is but not necessarily need to store it.

This is where AJAX comes in, by using this type of technology your user interface could be serenely displaying simple information to you on your pocket screen, or PC whilst behind the scenes it would be paddling like crazy aggregating access to what you are interested in.

What are the benefits of that then? You'll soon have as much computing power in your pocket as NASA would have been prowd of a few years back, so it will be possible to carry out the processing required close to where it is needed. The data [your data] will be kept together where it is most relevant, with you. Your local device will only go and get something when it needs it, not having to download the whole planet to search for it.

Far fetched? Only time, but not that much of it, will tell!

Yet more OpenSearch discussion …….

2005-03-30T16:05:00.002Z

The release and subsequent discussions about Amazon A9’s OpenSearch protocol has identified some discussion points around what type and sophistication of search capability should be offered by Library and Information systems.

The latest shots in this coming from Lorcan Dempsey & Thom Hickey at OCLC, both referencing their colleague Ralph LeVan .

To caricature the situation:

We in one camp, have the information scientists and librarians extolling the virtues of a powerful flexible search systems allowing the user to describe in the finest detail, down to an individual part of a Marc tag, what they are searching for. Then being able to combine that with other equally detailed search elements, limited by many things such as language, format, dates, and author’s inside leg measurement. [I did say it was a caricature]

In the other camp we have the proletariat of users who find putting more than two words in to an Amazoogle prompt a bit of a strain.

The first group delight in a search screen with more prompts than you can shake a stick at, the rest have never clicked an Advanced Search link in their life.

So towards which group do the Library/Information system developers and suppliers concentrate their efforts, and develop protocols to support? I contend that we need to service both these communities, as fully as possible. Without the former there would be far less stuff catalogued for the latter group to reliably search for and find.

Thom questions if there is a middle ground between SRU and OpenSearch. I think the answer is that there is something between these two that is worth discussing. Whether it is in the middle, I’m not so sure. Ralph commented, and I replied in more detail than here, on one of my previous blogs on the subject.

Ralph has offered to help develop guidelines on how to make an SRU & OpenSearch compatible solution to emerge. His experience around Z39.50, SRU/W, and metasearch will be invaluable towards this. I am also happy to get involved in such discussions, maybe coming at it from the other end by wearing a hat bearing the legend “Unadventurous member of the Internet Proletariat”

“It's not a system that would impress a librarian, but…. “

2005-03-29T12:18:00.000Z

Folksonomies remain in the news with Jack Schofield in last Thursday’s Guardian reporting back from the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, California that “Folksonomy was the big, bad, buzzword”

Schofield asserts that folksonomies, as used by sites such as Flickr for sharing photos or del.icio.us for web links, would not “impress a librarian”. But “they are also important because this is probably the only viable way of tagging billions of items on the net. No one is going to hire millions of trained librarians to do the job”.

It’s not that librarians haven’t tried. In 1998 OCLC launched the CORC project turning its vast cataloguing expertise to “taming the Web” with the prospect of a catalogue of Web content on the scale of OCLC’s huge bibliographic database, the WorldCat. “Both full USMARC cataloguing and an enhanced Dublin Core metadata mode will be used” it was announced. More modestly at Talis we have Talis List, a web based reading list system that allows academics and/or librarians to “harvest” (in a manner not unlike delicious) and categorise web sites very simply and add them to a course “resource list” for students.

It’s not just “tagging” technology that is challenging librarians. As regular readers of this blog will know, Talis has been engaged in a project around RSS technology that has now expanded to include Open Search. Coincidentally OpenSearch was also featured at the Emerging Technology conference by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Richard Wallis has discussed our take on RSS and OpenSearch in more detail including his Talis Prism (library catalogue) OpenSearch proof of concept.
So coming back to the first point, librarians may not be impressed with what seem to be simplistic approaches to cataloguing, classification or search. We know the problems are complex. The point though is that we can see our comfortable, complex, feature rich but domain specific technologies and standards like MARC, Z39.50 etc being challenged from outside the domain by companies with a bigger problem to solve: --Web 2.0. That’s why, at Talis, we take them seriously and get involved.

Udell wooed by OpenSearch

2005-03-28T19:17:00.000Z

To be honest, I wasn’t even planning to enable RSS subscription to InfoWorld search. It just came for free. When that happens, it’s a sign that things are deeply right.

Jon Udell on InfoWorld has a play with A9's OpenSearch.

When I heard about OpenSearch, I wondered how hard it would be to integrate my new view of InfoWorld search as a “column” in A9. As I soon learned, it’s almost trivial.
I know I've been banging on about OpenSearch a bit since it was announced, but in the same way that it's parent RSS has rapidly changed the way we find out about things happening, I get the feeling that A9 are going to get the credit for instigating a rapid change the way searching hangs together.

Don't get me wrong, OpenSearch is a long way short of a search utopia but with a little bit of evolution [a couple of 1.x updates and then a version 2.0] I believe it stands a chance of becoming the utility search protocol that could knit together much of the web's search nodes in to a cohesive unit.

Time will tell as to the quality of my crystal ball skills. Nevertheless, reading between his lines, Jon Udell seems to agree that there is something in this worth watching.

Podcasting from Open Stacks

2005-03-24T09:53:00.000Z

I've just been listening to Greg Schwartz's of Open Stacks Podcast [mp3] on his experiences at the CIL show from last week.

Apart from him being deserving of our sympathy, he was obviously suffering from 'Man Flu' throughout the event, his insight on what he saw was interesting as well. Not just the presentations but the buzz around the show, and his observations on the communities of users who's radar we need to get the Library to show up on.

The main reason I'm blogging this is because its great to see libraries entering the world of Podcasting. Since the coming of Podcasting and rewritable CD's, my car journey home from the office has been a far more informative, interesting, and entertaining experience. (Yes I'm one of the few on the planet without an iPod)

People like Greg, and the guys from IT Conversations [btw I wonder what has happened to the mostly excellent Gillmor Gang, they appear to have fallen off the planet] have opened my eyes & mind to loads of things relevant, but not necessarily directly connected, to what we all do and think about.

Dave Errington, Talis CEO, in his keynote at the Talis Insight Conference last November predicted that Podcasting, along with IM, RSS, Blogging, etc. will start to gain greater influence in our world. Its great to see his prediction coming true so soon.

Anyway back to the cause of this posting. Well done Greg keep it up. Hope you get to Internet Librarian in October and Podcast from there, and maybe we get to meet up.

LISFeeds.com

2005-03-22T13:34:00.000Z

Panlibus now feeds into LISFeeds.com.

A Talis demonstrator for the new evolution of RSS - A9's OpenSearch

2005-03-20T14:34:00.000Z

You can always tell when a technology has become established, when it starts being used for something else. How many remember that http was a protocol just designed to shift hypertext around a network, or that SGML with its offsprings of HTML & XML, was just something to make typesetters life easier.

Well with Amazon A9's announcement of OpenSearch RSS has reached that stage in its evolution. Whatever the arguments about what the letters RSS actually stand for [my favorite and the one in the specification, is still Really Simple Syndication], its use up until now has been about providing alerts or newsfeeds of events to users.

The few variations on this such as Podcasting, and our own Personalised RSS, are still basicly all about alerting you of events. Even MSN's RSS search alerts you that a search is now returning some new results.

So how has OpenSearch evolved beyond the original concept of RSS?

Firstly the staring point. RSS is not only really simple but it is established. If you want to do anything with it from a development point of view, there is sufficient stuff out there for you not to have to bother with any of the low-level stuff. If you are in the Java world, just pull down Rome and away you go, similarly in the .net universe.

Secondly, problems its implementation components solve are very similar to other problems out there. This is where OpenSearch gets in to the story. Newsfeeds provide lists of genericly described items in a results set. For a search engine to return an anser it needs to provide lists of genericly described items in a results set.

So with the launch of OpenSearch A9 have created an instant comunity for search, that most engines would want to be part of, and have made it very easy to join.

The best way to prove exactly how easy, is to do it.

And over the last couple of days, that is what I have done. Talis now have prototype OpenSearch interface to the demonstration Prism Library OPAC.

The following link takes you to the OpenSearch standard Description Document:
http://demo.talis.com:6080/TalisPrism/OpenSearch.xml
Its contents describe the OpenSearch as provided by Prism, and the way to access it.

The 'Url' element contains the Url used to access to the service, encoded in the OpenSearch Query Syntax. By replacing the '{}' encoded tags with values A9's service can construct requests to search and then page through sets of results, thus:

Not rocket science as you can see. So it won't be long before A9 is not the only OpenSearch client on the block

If you have been clicking on these links in your browser you will only be seeing XML. Try pasting the links in to your favorite RSS reader to see the effect.

Better still try it from A9 [You will have to register & login, but its worth it] Enter the description url [http://demo.talis.com:6080/TalisPrism/OpenSearch.xml] in to their Create New column page and press load.

You will then see the description in a more readable form, and more importantly a preview of what the results will look like in A9 is loaded at the right of the page.

The exciting bit, from the potential user's point of view, is that by clicking on the title of a result you are taken to the detail for the result, displayed in the Prism interface. If you were in a real library you could then go on and place a reservation request for the item, or discover which branches the item was held at, etc. As an aside this functionality is provided by yet another technology that is spreading its wings beyond its original concept, OpenUrl. But that's another story.

So where next?

The Talis Prim OpenSearch interface, that will move in to project Bluebird which is all about communicating with users, using technologies like RSS, SMS, etc.
OpenSearch I fully expect to grow beyond A9. It has a great opportunity to become a defacto simple search interface. With a bit of help from the library community, there is no reason why it couldn't be built upon to become a suitable alternative for some of our search protocols, that are not so simple. [Do I hear a little cheer from the developers who have ever tried to get their head around implementing Z39.50]

Changing role of public libraries

2005-03-18T15:06:00.000Z

I've come across some research that deserves a wider hearing - an article published in the Journal of Documentation Vol 60, No.6, 2004, p.632-652by Douglas Grindlay and Anne Morris has researched the causes of declining borrowing in UK libraries.

The strong conclusion is that increasing personal affluence is the single direct cause of decreasing issue figures.

This should be factored in to thinking about the future role of libraries - the mandate for their existence is changing away from issuing books.

When will XML replace MARC?

2005-03-18T10:30:00.000Z

This is the subject line of a thread that's been running on the XML4LIB email list over the last couple of days. The question has been around almost as long as XML itself, but MARC is still very much with us.

Several writers in the thread argue that the question is wrong: XML cannot replace MARC because they are different things. For me, though, that confuses three different components in the MARC world: the MARC standard (ISO 2709), the different flavours such as MARC 21, which are like application profiles defining content designators and lists of values, and content standards, predominantly Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). ISO 2709 is a kind of extensible markup language designed for data exchange and so could be replaced by XML, but it can only be done effectively when the other two components are re-aligned to modern requirements and to the flexible power of XML.

Not surprisingly, the Library of Congress' MARCXML framework is discussed in the thread. In a strict sense, it replaces MARC, i.e. ISO 2709, with XML. But it deliberately emulates precisely the restrictive structural characteristics of MARC, enabling round trip no loss conversion, to allow MARC data to be manipulated and transformed to other formats and contexts, using modern XML tools. Undoubtedly, this has been a tonic for the geriatric MARC, or (switching metaphors) it is a useful bridge or stopgap between the the old world of MARC and a new world, as yet not fully realised, based on XML. It allows a little more value to be squeezed from the huge investment of systems and data in MARC.

Some writers in the thread, however, criticise MARCXML for not being the panacea that it makes no claim to be. Its structure means that it is not well suited to XML indexing systems so performance is sub-optimal and, more importantly, it is not capable of articulating metadata in ways that are now required. Several writers call not only for better articulation of the metadata but also for a different set of metadata elements, more suited to modern requirements for search, navigation, data presentation and interchange between heterogeneous environments. Peter Binkley (University of Alberta) puts it well:

... we need metadata to aid not just searching but also clustering, linking to relevant external resources, etc. - all the things we can do in the new environment to enhance search results and other forms of access. The XML tools for using web services etc. are great and will get better much faster than anything MARC-based.

Here, though, we move into the territory of application profiles and content rules. As several other writers in the thread point out, an area of activity that could be leading the way to a full replacement of MARC is that based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). In the publishing world, it provided the conceptual model for the bibliographic elements of the Indecs framework, which led to the development of the ONIX format. Now, its principles are being built into the next edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, AACR3. Although AACR3 will be capable of expression in MARC 21, it will push MARC's capabilities closer to the limits. MARC records have been 'FRBRised' in a number of different initiatives with some success, but the work has clearly discovered shortcomings in the MARC format.

MARC will not be replaced by a single, dominant and self-contained metadata format. We can no longer even scope the contents of a 'self-contained' record. Increasingly, we require and have the ability to connect pieces of content dynamically and unrestrictedly, as we move towards the semantic web. The 'replacement' will be a metadata infrastructure. This is well argued by Roy Tennant in his article A bibliographic metadata infrastructure for the 21st century, summed up in his catchphrase 'I never metadata I didn't like'.

Dick Miller and his colleagues at the Lane Medical Library, Stanford University Medical Center, have done a great deal of impressive work to show the way forward for bibliographic data, in their development of XOBIS. A quote from his post to the thread makes a fitting end:

Some may think that MARC is robust since so many ILS systems use it, but ILS systems themselves are endangered, not able to respond with agility to changing technologies. For libraries to flourish, bibliographic data needs to be flexibly deployable in broader environments lest we will gradually lose relevance.

Public Library Impact Measures Published

2005-03-11T12:02:00.000Z

In a positive move towards defining a common purpose for libraries and one which delivers to Government priorities, the Public Library Impact Measures were launched this week. Details can be found in the MLA web site .

Parliamentary review of Public Libraries

2005-03-10T13:46:00.000Z

The UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Libraries has now published its findings, it is available at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcumeds/81/81i.pdf
The background evidence is available in a separate report: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcumeds/81/81ii.pdf

Whilst giving credit where it is due, it identifies the patchy nature of library provision in the UK and lack of clear focus and priorities across all services:

We regard a situation in which core performance indicators, and gross throughput, are falling—but overall costs are rising—as a signal of a service in distress.

Our key recommendations are designed to focus attention on libraries' fundamental role in promoting reading and we seek to distinguish clearly between core functions and desirable add-ons (prioritising resources in favour of the former). There need to be far stronger links between national library standards (which themselves need improving) and effective mechanisms to encourage and enable library services to meet, if not surpass, them.
I'm sure this will provoke considerable debate!

Future of Public Libraries

2005-03-09T11:36:00.000Z

Report from the Conference on 'The Public Library Service in 2015'.

This conference was set up by the Laser Foundation to discuss the thought-provoking 'Futures Group Report'. I attended with high hopes of some visionary debate. The audience was made up of many of the people who run the nations public library services.

John McTernan (an adviser to the Prime Minister) started with some challenging thinking on what the Government expects from Public Libraries - it should be no surprise that they're looking for change. His hypotheses for the future were:

There may be no public libraries in 2015
The public library service may be nationalised - part of the British Library
Public libraries services may be delivered at neighbourhood level.

A number of clear steers on short-term challenges to libraries emerged:

Public service reform will be applied to libraries (read efficiency savings)
Local government is likely to be reorganised into 'effective economic units delivering a cluster of services'.

Read what you like into this - to me it sounds like a soundbite for fewer local authorities (there is already talk about reorganising local government into regional/sub-regional/cities).
He finished with the challenge that librarians have to want to change. The evidence I heard was of delegates showing willing to change but not knowing what to?

Lord McIntosh from DCMS talked about new regional structures (there's a message here from the two government speakers - this is going to happen). His other message was about cutting back office costs to release resources to the front line (efficiency savings again), and encouraging library authorities to work together on service provision (so regionalise yourselves before we do it to you?).
This was not a vision of a future public library service - more a view of future local government reorganisation - and this from the Minister for Libraries!

Chris Smith, MP and former Minister for Libraries said more of the same - questioning whether libraries should be part of local authorities structure.

So 3 people from Government talked about re-organisation - stemming from the need to cut costs in local government, but nothing about the role for or value they see in public libraries. Is this a reflection of the apparent confusion in the role of public libraries in the face of declining issues - there is no other service that libraries can claim to do well?

More news is due soon from government with the imminent publication of the Select Committee Report on Public Libraries. We also await the results of the MLAC-sponsored report on book procurement in public libraries.

Chris Trinick, Chief Executive from Lancashire County Council provided a positive view of the future - it's encouraging to find the man in charge of one of the countrys largest local authorities as a proponent of libraries. He still challenged whether libraries would be part of local authorities and - providing some alternative suggestions based on charitable status. Significantly, he laid down the challenge to libraries to take decisions on future services based on evidence of benefit (back to my recent post on value).

Charlie Leadbetter, consultant and one of the leading thinkers behind Framework For the Future came closest to setting out a vision for future services. His vision is of a 3-fold service:

Provide self service for the users who know what they want (get out of the way)
Offer a personalised service for users who don't know what they want (offer a tailored interview/response service)
Reach out to those who either don't know they have needs or can't articulate them (offer a very localised approach through pubs & supermarkets, etc).

This picks up and expands on an area that many delegates were sensitive to in the Futures report - that of offering a 2 tier service. He also challenged whether some library activities could be outsourced.

Charlie challenged the audience to form a library network to work together - the value and power of the network far exceeds that of individual nodes. This is beginning to be evidenced in networks such as SeamlessUK. So many libraries argue for 'representation', yet look to other bodies such as MLAC to do something for them - this is a rallying call.

I had hoped that this would be a pivotal day for public libraries, where a vision of the future would emerge and concensus to act on it, but they failed to seize the day - concluding that MLAC (a government quango) would provide the vision and steer they crave so badly (not recognising the conflict of interest!). This represents a failure to take individual or collective responsibility for their future.

There was lots of emotive talk about services and value on the day. Libraries need to acknowledge the impact of changes in society and technology and produce a response to these. They also need to understand the value of their services in economic terms and to use this to focus and justify activities and to make the case for future investment.

Congratulations to the Laser Foundation and the Futures Group for provoking the debate, but we're still no clearer on the future role of the public library.

Metadata adds value: Photos plus metadata equals money.

2005-02-24T18:29:00.000Z

Sharing photos, via websites, amongst family and friends is nothing unusual and now some websites are offering to market your photos to publishers and other markets enabling you to make money. Metadata produce the value-add and transform a picture of your holiday that you might otherwise only share with family and friends into product that a publisher will buy. fotoLibra is a good example of such a site and has been getting some attention in the business press and was featured in February’s Real Business magazine’s “50 to watch 2005”. fotoLibra, With their business model in mind, devote a lot of effort on advice on how to create metadata even (in the their forum) going into some detail about Dublin Core.

“Established [picture] libraries are now busy cataloguing and digitising their huge collections, and searching can be a nightmare. That's where fotoLibra has a great advantage. The people cataloguing its images are the ones who know them best—the photographers and picture owners themselves. That means picture buyers can find exactly what they're looking for, quickly and reliably.“

So here is value from Metadata being created at source. There is however an interesting forum debate about the resulting problems of “keywording”. People often overdo the metadata and “throw the dictionary or thesaurus at it” I also found it interesting that they are using DOIs.

Flickr from Ludicorp research is another photo sharing site that is getting a lot of attention and was featured in the Guardian recently. It is interesting that you can choose to license the photos you upload to Flickr under a Creative Commons license. They too place a lot of emphasis on metadata or “tags” Both these sites, because they are about sharing are good examples of Folksonomy in action. I noticed Ludicorp’s president Stewart Butterfield is sharing a platform to speak on “Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess” at next month’s emerging technology conference in San Diego.

Value and the future of public libraries

2005-02-18T15:25:00.000Z

You know that a movement might be forming when two challenging ideas arrive on the same day.

1. I was reading an excellent article first published in American Libraries about value and public libraries (thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the reference), at: http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=1200. This quote particularly resonated:

"Valuable does not necessarily correspond with the library staffs ideas of importance."

2. Understanding value is an area that is challenging UK public libraries evidenced by todays publication of the Laser Futures Group report on the Future of Public Libraries.

Put these together and stir the pot.

One of the options the Laser report mentions is that the running of library services be handed to the regional MLAs and removed from local authority control. This would seem to be a way to remove duplication and inefficiency, but begs further research and brings us back to the question of value – the answer is in the eye of the beholder, so maybe we should ask the users. Does a large authority such as Essex provide better ‘value’ than a small one like Kingston-upon-Thames just because of scale economies?

I was in the audience at PLA this year when Jeff Jacobs, Director General at DCMS gave a challenging speech (no powerpoint!) on the need for libraries to prove their value. He got a frosty reception to say the least, but I thought he made an absolutely fair point - one that appears to be gaining some currency now. His point was to ask what benefit libraries give in terms of economic contribution to their communities, rather than an emotive argument about the value of culture.

I question what public libraries are doing to understand where they add value. I'm hoping that other people will be asking this question, even trying to answer it at the forthcoming 1-day conference on 4th March that the Laser Foundation have organised to discuss this report – possibly the most important day this year for UK public libraries. I'm very much looking forward to it and I'll blog the day.

Talis working in partnership with Amazon

2005-02-18T13:32:00.000Z

I thought it would be worthwhile sharing with the blog community a new partnership that Talis has announced with none other than Amazon. A press release has just gone out and some of the booktrade press have picked it up, including The Bookseller and Book2Book.

As the press release underlines the Venice project was about offering more profitable ways for libraries to dispose of their stock. In this case, we worked with Amazon to enable our library customers to connect with Amazon Marketplace.

We have to thank East Renfrewshire who really went for the idea from the outset, and were willing to devote their time and staff resource to testing the concept. They initially loaded 500 titles using a batch process developed by Talis and sold 20% of the stock within a 12 week timescale. The return they got from selling the books on Amazon's marketplace, far outstripped the revenues they would have made had they pursued the more conventional approach of a booksale AND I would go as far as saying the additional staff resource required to run the process was more than recovered. Well, East Renfrewshire certainly seem to think so because even though the project itself has now ended, they will continue to run the software.

One of the really neat features about Venice was that we used Amazon's Web Services to pull data into our application. A library could view for the first time:

the item's list price (as new)
the second-hand list price (lowest and highest)
the number of used copies on sale for that particular item

just by scanning the barcode of the book with a reader.

Armed with this information East Renfrewshire could make sound decisions on what was worth selling through Marketplace, and what they could dispense with more effectively elsewhere ie. via booksales etc. It also allowed them to "play the market". Their sales strategy was to undercut other vendors on the site, in order to get the books out of the door as quickly as possible.

The project raised many interesting points, which are worthy of further consideration:

Purchasing Behaviour - East Renfrewshire found that by adopting the Venice approach to stock disposal they began to start analysing their front-end acquisition process. Dare I say it, they could consider the idea that the speed in which stock via Marketplace got sold might influence their future purchasing decisions. ie. let's buy more of those kinds of books because we can dispose of them more quickly, efficiently and profitably at the end of their shelf-life.
Visibility of Value - the data we pulled in to the application via Amazon's Web Services, for the first time gave East Renfrewshire a real true sense of the market value for their holdings. It went some way to dispelling the notion that a book ceases to have a pecuniary value, once it has been used. More than that, it has highlighted to the library that some of their older stock has more than held its value. It has actually become in the eyes of the marketplace "rare" and the price reflects this. We have to ask, would so many of the public libraries' stock of First Edition Harry Potters have disappeared, if the stock manager had a tool like Venice to keep them informed?
Optimisation - As car owners we make a point of knowing when in our car's life it has reached its optimum resale value - whether we act on it or not is a different matter. Venice has offered the same optimisation opportunity to libraries for their books. Over time, a library using the Venice approach could understand that a book's resale value is optimised at a given point, and adjust their withdrawal policies accordingly. Potentially, the shelf life of a library item could be shortened, but the revenues used to replenish stock with more current materials.

Venice has come at a really interesting time for libraries. Politically, we have the Department for Culture, Media and Sport questioning the efficiency of the supply chain and whether libraries are getting enough "books for the buck". By focussing on the creation of a resale opportunity for libraries' stock, we are demonstrating a fantastic opportunity for libraries to derive additional revenue from stock which can be ploughed back into new items.

Anyway, long blog, but lots to say. We are currently genericising the app that East Renfrewshire used and will be shortly be making it available via the Talis Developer Network.

Ground breaking Library Personalised RSS

2005-02-15T14:54:00.000Z

Talis, in partnership with Northumbria University Library, have launched a trial of personalised RSS (PRSS) feeds for Library users. This trial is part of the Talis Research Project Bluebird. Members of the trial and other interested parties, interact on the Talis Bluebird Forum.

Subscribers to their personal feed receive alerts from their Library account such as 'Item due for return in 3 days', or 'The item you reserved is now awaiting collection at the Library', or 'Your overdue item has already attracted in excess of £2.00 in charges'. The feed items provide a link to take the user, without an interviening login challenge, in to their Library interface at the apropriate page to take the required action such as renew the book on loan.

To illustrate the issues surrounding the requirement for alerting Library Users, to describe the technology used, and to give an overview of the trial I have published a white paper Personalised RSS for Library - User Interaction.

We have set-up a Demonstration PRSS Feed to show how the loaning activity of a fictitious user [Mr Draco Malfoy] would be represented in his Personalised RSS feed. Over the next couple of months Mr Malfoy will reserve, loan, and return (often late) items from the Demonstration Library to provide pseudo realistic RSS traffic.

So what is ground breaking then?

Firstly, Talis are the first LMS/ILS supplier to demonstrate live Library Borrower/Patron account data alerts using RSS.

Secondly, although there are many thousands of RSS feeds around there are very few that are personalised to a specific user on a specific system. Up until now RSS has been [as the most popular definition of those three letters imply] about Syndicating published information in a Really Simple way, to anyone who can subscribe.

Along with RSS Feeds to return search results, as announced by MSN [ MSN Search: Panlibus ] and other Library suppliers [theshiftedlibrarian - "ILS vendor to offer native RSS feeds out of the catalog"], PRSS opens up the third generation of RSS applications. (Podcasting ushered in the second generation. So many generations and not yet a teenager! )

PRSS has the promise to open up a whole new world of proactive alerting for subscribed users, and you heard about it here first folks!

The image of Libraries just being places with lots of books where there is not much innovation is definitely old hat!

The changing face of libraries

2005-02-11T13:10:00.000Z

It was good to hear the BBC debating libraries again on Tuesday. (BBC Radio 4 "Shop Talk") Tim Coates was there doing some “retail” challenging and Andrew Stevens from the Museums Libraries and Archive Council (MLA) agreed that bookshops have taken the lead in marketing and presenting their wares and libraries can learn a lot from them. (btw Andrew did a keynote presentation to the Talis Insight conference too in November).

Heather Wills from Tower Hamlets explained their Idea Stores and how the initiative was based on major market research so they were providing what people wanted like better locations, 7 day opening and access to IT. She took pains to emphasise the role of books and that borrowing was going up (in contradiction of the national trend). Books have become a sort of cipher to represent unchallengeable cultural value I think. It’s assumed we all agree books are good so we don’t have to go further and debate their underlying cultural value. Indeed libraries are (by literal definition at least) about books and certainly this is what the last November’s report to Parliament on public library matters states as the “core purpose of libraries” To my mind the underlying value of books (and more widely of course the process of reading and literature itself) was far better expressed in the same month by Philip Pullman in his Guardian Article (itself an extract from an article in Index on censorship) and the danger to democracies if they “forget how to read” and in effect lose their imagination and demand that reading is “for” something—in essence only to support a particular agenda or outcome. That why I think the work that Rachel Van Riel of Opening the Book is doing is important. She also gave an invigorating keynote presentation at the Talis Insight Conference in November

The value of culture –the value of libraries

2005-02-09T22:50:00.000Z

Paul Miller, The Common Information Environment Director made some interesting comments on 4th February in his blog about the challenge of "placing a value on culture". He cites the Demos report of December called "Capturing Cultural Values" by John Holden. "Cultural organisations and their funding bodies have become very good at describing their value in terms of social outcomes.." I certainly view libraries as "cultural organisations" so this issue is of very real concern to Talis because we provide technology solutions to libraries and if they don't see value we won't sell our products and services. It's (relatively) easy to make the case (around efficiency and cost saving) for technologies like RFID but it can be harder to assign (cash) value to the bigger and more important issues. As our products evolve and make more and more resources available in easier and more digestible ways we confront real business model problems. Users want access to more and more content whilst the owners/providers of content are struggling to find ways of making money from their content over the internet and we've seen a real difficulty in find workable business models.

But maybe this is just inevitable at this stage in the technology's evolution? We've all let Google dazzle us with their programme to digitise the collections of major libraries like the Bodleian in Oxford. This is part of Google's mission to "organise the world's information" but they admit they still don't know what the business model will be. Fabio Selmoni, Google's European Sales Director make a fascinating comment during Tuesday's BBC radio 4 programme "Shop Talk". The theme was the changing face of libraries. When challenged by the presenter Heather Payton about how the project will make money he remarked that they weren't preoccupied with the business model. He was really admitting that right now they don't know how they will make money. At this stage it was a research project that was being done because it fitted into Google's vision. In a sense isn't that just how our public libraries operated in the past? I mean there was a strong cultural vision. Is some of that being lost with the emphasis on "outcomes" and CPA ratings?. Of course the vision was based on a business model where ultimately the taxpayer pays. So who will pay Google? Advertising? Hmmmmm

Visualisation - the future in OPACs

2005-02-09T16:20:00.000Z

As a community we have to recognise that OPACs are not user-centric. Visitors to the library rarely use them for anything other than specific location information, and the idea that web-enabling OPACs in the current form will extend their reach to a wider audience is flawed.

We have to embrace the notion that "NextGens" will continue to switch off from text-oriented systems as they become increasingly attuned to more visual and immediate stimuli. We see this in the development of learning objects for teaching and the extensive reach of the gaming culture.

Its good to see search engines like Groxis, grasping the nettle. And software companies like Anacubis are already manipulating business intelligence from Hoover's and others to represent commercial relationships in visual formats, that are far easier to absorb. In addition, Anacubis is recreating Google searches in a visual format which is worth a look.

Talking of which, a colleague of mine pointed me to Langreiter.com, they have used visualisation technology to produce Google sets in a visual format.

So what does that mean for libraries? Well, I am a fan of the Amazon feature "the person who bought this, also bought....." but am frequently disappointed. The information presented can occasionally turn up gems, but rarely do I find subject-specific or genre-specific information. Quite frequently, the purchasing patterns reflect a desire to buy material by the same author/artist, which makes me feel that I could get the same value from viewing an author/artist's bibliography/discography.

Would a libraries's borrower information reflect in the same way? And would there be additional value in a visual format? Not sure, but think it could be interesting, and potentially stimulate interest from disengaged users?

Web Services and Metasearch – VIEWS on the subject

2005-02-08T16:11:00.000Z

Talis is a founder member of VIEWS – the Vendor Initiative for Enabling Web Services.

VIEWS is an industry-wide cooperative effort to leverage libraries’ expertise in understanding, processing, and delivering information with the functional and practical efficiencies delivered through Web Services.

Revolution or another competitor in library software?

2005-01-25T13:58:00.000Z

I noticed a paper called THE COMING REVOLUTION IN LIBRARY SOFTWARE by David Dorman on IndexData’s Web site. I checkout this site regularly because they provide good, reliable, efficient open source technology for search and retrieval of meta-data with packages such as Yaz and Zebra. In the paper he argues a new business model for delivering software to libraries called commercial open-source will cause a paradigm shift in the market. He makes a plea for libraries to fund the initial development costs with a 10 point plan. He sees further development and support being charged to customers. This doesn’t seem so different from a traditional commercial model where development costs are recovered from customers through purchase costs and further development is funded through recurrent payments. He claims open source software development results in ‘less expensive and better designed software, and speedier development’ than development by traditional vendors. In the competitive market of library software supply this seems difficult to justify. Competition is driving down customer costs because cost is a factor in winning bids. ‘Better designed’ software can give more reliable and usable solutions generating fewer support calls. Lower maintenance costs are attractive to vendors because it reduces costs making lower recurrent charges possible. Lower total cost for customers over the lifetime of a system is an important competitive advantage. Vendors seek speedier development to reduce time to market as competitors fight to attract new customers. He says for commercial open source vendors ‘Development, rather than being an opportunity to sell more licenses, or a burdensome overhead cost to be avoided if possible, becomes the primary revenue generator’. My experience with Talis is we enjoy our development; our purpose is to develop solutions for our customers. And if we don’t develop attractive solutions we don’t sell so development is central to our success. On quality he implies peer review of open source code is more likely to achieve high quality software than a software engineering process incorporating reviews at each major milestone of analysis, design, implementation and test. In addition to software development processes Talis publishes end user documentation, database schema, stored procedure code, scripts for useful utilities. He suggests abandoning proprietary development tools in favour of open source alternatives. We use third party programming tools such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio, a best of breed tool, to speed delivery and enhance quality. On commercial open source he says ‘This Model requires a new and closer relationship between vendors and libraries’. Isn’t this what all vendors are striving for? Talis fosters a community who share useful tools in source code provided by customers and partners through our Talis Developer Network. His vision assumes there are cohorts of willing library programmers with sufficient knowledge, skill, free time and resources to develop library software. Instead I see a community of customers behaving with enlightened self-interest to pass on experiences to fellow customers. In practice my guess is IndexData will have a core development team with a few external trusted developers providing code fixes. I don’t see a paradigm sift, I see another competitor in the library software market.

Mobile and PDA technologies and their future use in education

2005-01-25T13:54:00.000Z

This is the title of the latest JISC Techwatch report, published in November 2004, whch I've just dipped into. Here's their overview:

In recent years there has been a phenomenal growth in the number and technical sophistication of what can loosely be termed 'mobile devices' such as PDAs, mobile phones and media players. Increasingly these devices are also internet-enabled. This JISC report reviews the current state of the art, explores the potential uses within education and discusses some of the trends in technological development such as wireless networking, device convergence and 'always-on' connectivity.

An email update from one of the authors, via the Techwatch email list, last week, points out that there remains considerable uncertainty ('fog') around fast wireless access technologies, but the following conclusion serves to emphasise, for me, the need for libraries and their systems suppliers to be focusing on delivering data and services to these technologies:

... widespread adoption by students and staff of always-on mobile devices will partly be driven by the development of wireless broadband networks that can deliver the Internet to these devices. As the competition to deliver high speeds through the various technology paths increases so the likely time to market for low cost consumer solutions is likely to fall. As currently planned by manufacturers this kind of high speed access should be relatively normal by the end of the decade.

Although this has an academic library perspective, it will surely apply equally to actual and potential users of public libraries because this is about general consumer technology. Once again it's a reminder to take the library to the users, use the technology that they use (redefining the meaning of 'mobile' for libraries!), or be ignored.

Amazon make queueing a reliable experience

2005-01-19T13:09:00.000Z

An Amazon Web Services announcement which snuck under my radar recently was the launch of their Beta [aren't they all nowadays!] Simple Queue Service.

This is not as you may at first think something to keep the people waiting, behind the person checking out every book on their favourite subject whilst returning all the items found in their three year old's toy box, amused so they don't hassle the person waving the bar-code reader when they eventually arrive at the front of the queue.

No, this is a bit of technology delivered as a service which should excite the developers of interactive applications which may or may not access Amazon content. It provides a general purpose service to manage a set of queues of up to 4,000 data messages of up to 4 kbytes in size with a message maximum life time of 30 days.

When developers are building applications and services which involve the interaction between more than one system, they very quickly bang up against the need to pass messages between those systems. Most developers will tell you that this is not rocket science, even when the message delivery has to be reliable [some form of guarantee that a message is not lost, or incorrectly delivered].

The problem that is often tripped over when implementing such systems is that for messages to be delivered reliably they need to pass through a messaging system which keeps temporary copies of messages and manages queues etc. Such systems need to be managed, maintained, backed up, etc. The overhead of such housekeeping operations, is often considered to be such a pain that it can detract from the business case for delivering a new service.

So what are Amazon up to in launching something that will be hidden under the hood of other peoples applications, and unlike their other Web Services will not necessarily lead to clicks back to buy stuff from them?

Firstly, I would expect that it is a low cost service to provide. They almost certainly have been using this technology in-house to support their own services for sometime. Adding a few publicly visible servers to their set would not add much overhead.

Secondly, are they dipping their toe in to the emerging market for the supply of software component services. A software equivalence to Sun's 1$ a CPU cycle service?

Whatever their commercial strategy on this, what they are doing is floating it on the trusted Amazon brand.

OK you want to delegate off to some third party the job of looking after the messaging queues that underpin your application. So who do you pick? Someone you trust, with a 'good name' so why not Amazon. Would you choose them over some little known hosting company, or maybe another little company with their headquarters in Seattle?

I'll leave you to ponder on that....

Meditations from ALA

2005-01-16T15:07:00.000Z

Ken Chad Executive Director, Talis

Where's the innovation?

"Where do you see the innovation coming from ?" asked Andrew Pace from North Carolina State University towards the end of Friday's "View from the Top" seminar. The question was addressed to me and the other panelists - the CEOs and chief executives in the library and information industry. Judging from the response of the main US library system vendors not from there! Roland Dietz, President and CEO of Endeavor (owned by Elsevier) had earlier, and not surprisingly singled out Google as a major challenge. So is the innovation going to come from outside - Amazon, Google even Microsoft? For me at Talis this is a fundamental question. We are putting a lot of investment in smart people and have some smart ideas too. Of course we have to keep our focus on evolving our core products and services but we won't survive long unless we innovate.

Where's the value?

The seminar provoked a lot of discussion about the "value" of libraries and how that appears not to be expressed the dollars spent with the library automation vendors. Libraries (especially public libraries) are faced with budget cuts. Money is being spent not so much on library technology but rather on other enterprise wide systems for the institution as a whole. We see this too in the UK . Money (lots of it in some cases) in universities and local authorities is going into human resources (or CRM) systems, finance packages, portals and, notably in HE on Virtual Learning environments (VLEs).

Bob Walton, the Vice President for Business and Finance at the College of Wooster and a recent purchaser of such systems wondered why it is that, in his view, compared to library systems, these other enterprise systems are:-

Less sophisticated
Less reliable
More expense in terms of software licencing
More expensive in ongoing maintenance
Take much longer (three times longer?) to implement
Hugely (ten times?) more expensive in terms of training

Maybe its simply because there is less competition? That market is continuing to consolidate --as will the library market. But the short answer is that's where the institution sees the value. It's true that over the last 25 years librarians and vendors have jointly done a good job in implementing and developing reliable high quality systems. Rob McGee (head of RMG consultants) remarked that maybe, as the library vendors had done such a great job, they should get into this "ERP" sector? "The entry costs are now too high" thought Vinod Chachra from VTLS.

Value on my mind

The value thing is on my mind a lot of course. On the plane over I was reading the Guardian Life section. The job ads in the IT section are just one way to see what's going on in the industry, especially in universities. I note that a major UK university is going to be spending around £25,000 a year (more if you take all costs related to employment into account) on a person to primarily work on integrating the library system with the VLE. A friend of mine recently got a similar job at another university. It's not a short term contract job either, so over five years that's a substantial sum (certainly compared to the cost of library software) being spent on just one aspect of "integration". That's just some indication of where universities see the value and, not unsurprisingly, it's about improving the overall learning environment.

So what about public libraries? Where do they really see the value (i.e. where are they going to be spending their money)? The Government (DCMS), in its recent (Nov 2004) report to Parliament on "Public Library Matters" puts some emphasis on learning too and also sees public libraries as "community hubs". So is that where the money will go? How will those goals be supported by technology?

Heritage and museums have been seen as a way to help with building cohesive communities. Phrases like a "sense of place" come to mind. So why doesn't that sector puts much value on technology? Of course there are a few major projects in the big museums and, in the UK, the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) kick started some projects on digitisation a few years ago. I got involved in some of that and saw some brilliant work being done. But overall it seems museums and archives too don't place much value on IT to support their collections. I bring this up in the context of ALA as I was having coffee with one of the "greats" in our industry -a past president of one of the most successful library vendors. She had been looking to start a new business and thought she saw a great need for better museum and archive systems in the US and the UK. "There seemed so much good stuff I could do.." She even thought of buying one of the companies. "No money in it Ken: I just couldn't see a good return". Is she right?

ken.chad@talis.com

Blogging from Boston

2005-01-15T19:56:00.000Z

ALA Midwinter got underway yesterday in Boston, MA. I arrived late on Thursday (although not as late as some!) and by 11am (it took me a while to get going!) I was ready to go for what is going to be a busy schedule over the next few days.

My first meeting was RMG Consultants annual event at Midwinter - the Annual Presidents' Seminar: The View from the Top. The topic up for discussion was "THE NEW INTEGRATED LIBRARY SYSTEM: AN ENTERPRISE SOLUTION".

Ken Chad from Talis was 'up there' with the rest of them, representing our view of the world. I saw some old and not so old faces, and it was great to catch up with a few people. It was also good to see a few faces from across the pond represented - alongside Ken was Robin Murray from Fretwell-Downing and Sebastian Hammer from Index Data. A full list of panelists is available on the RMG web site.

So - how did it go? Well, a few common themes started to appear after a little while (it was a 3 hour session!).

There was some discussion of enterprise systems and ERP, but it was never really bottomed what was meant by this! But, what did become clear was how libraries need to integrate and become more outward facing. The need to provide library services and content through non-library channels did come across well from a few panelists. It was clear that the library's content and services are part of a wider organisation in a way that it has never been before, and vendors and libraries alike have to meet this challenge.

Open source and the sense of community across the library world was repeated throughout the session. This was varied, but it was emphasised that open source does not mean free - a popular misconception! However, open source in the ILS market won't evolve in the same way as it has in e-learning for example. The ILS market is mature and saturated, the e-learning market is emergent - one plays well to open source, the other not so well. However, if we talk about the problems that libraries have today, and the solutions that software or technology could provide, then maybe open source will come in to its own.

Market consolidation is inevitable - there are too many players currently. There are two ways this could come about - by merger/acquisition or by a 'best of breed' approach to the problem. There was some discussion about cross-licesning and partnering both within the industry and beyond.

Finally, libraries need to improve the way they sell themselves to their organisation. Nothing new there!

After a wander round the exhibition hall, and a chat with a few old faces, - I had my first face to face (informal!) meeting with my colleagues in the VIEWS group. It was great to put faces to names - a social meeting more than anything at the end of an interesting day.

Saturday started early - 6am, and on a Saturday too!

It was Endeavor's Digital Breakfast - a really interesting session, which apart from the great breakfast and freebies - told us about the work they've been doing to improve the usability of their product set. They've undertaken a user-centered design approach to Encompass, EJOS, Meridian, and are planning to do some work on a new version of the OPAC - that promises to be user-centered. They're clearly positioning usability as their differentiator this ALA. Elsevier have a usability team of 20 staff - what an amazing resource to have available to you!

After taking in the exhibition for an hour or so, and grabbing coffee with a former colleague, I headed off to the RUSA MARS Hot Topics Discussion Group - "Metasearch: what it is, what it could be, and how standards can help us get there!". It was a standing room only session, and a lively debate followed 2 presentations. The first presentation was by Andrew Pace from NCSU and one of the co-chairs of the NISO Metasearch Initiative which a couple of us at Talis are involved with. This was followed by a presentation from Boston College about their Metalib implementation. The subsequent discussion was primarily around the connectors used to do the metasearching itself - meaning screen scraping mainly, and vendors, information providers and librarians joined in the debate. It was interesting to hear certain vendors defend their screen scrape approach as what the customer wants, while the information providers asked why this method was being use, when they have a perfectly good Z-target. The debate will rage on - there are no easy answers to this one!

I've had a few nice chance meetings with people I've worked with on projects in the past as I've gone from meeting to meeting - that's one of the best bits of ALA - catching up with old faces!

ALA, Boston, day 1

2005-01-14T23:52:00.000Z

As usual, it has been a varied, busy and enjoyable first day at ALA here in Boston.

I kicked off by participating in a small discussion group hosted by OCLC on implementing the concepts of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, commonly known as FRBR (pronounced ferber). By exploiting the relationships between our current manifestation level records, search results can be grouped and presented to users in more meaningful ways, as well as retrieving relevant results that otherwise would be missed and eliminating irrelevant results. There are good examples already in the VTLS system and RedLightGreen, and OCLC’s FictionFinder and xISBN services. But there is scope for more, such as grouping and filtering results according to the user’s preferences. Cataloguing efficiencies could be achieved and quality and consistency of cataloguing improved by sharing records at the Work level. This is all getting closer to becoming a reality, with the changes to content rules coming through in AACR3 and with XML-based technologies.

Standards was the theme of my other two sessions. ‘Codified Innovations: Data Standards and their Useful Applications’ focused on standards relating to the control of e-journals. This is a field that is suffering from a combination of a lack of standardisation and a lack of implementation of available standards. Frieda Rosenberg and Diane Hillman have done some interesting work recently on holdings data, where a lack of standardisation is, for example, impeding the quality of results from link resolvers. Their work also called on FRBR concepts: An approach to Serials with FRBR in Mind. We also had an update on the revision ISSN, which has had a very troublesome time finding its way through deeply conflicting interests. It seems that consensus has formed around re-affirming the current definition, with the expectation or hope that the process of doing this will lead to publishers being more consistent in applying the ISSN assignment rules. There will also be a new, title-level ISSN to support library requirements and it is hoped that a place in MARC field 024 can be defined for it.

Finally, the Automation Vendor Information Advisory Committee (AVIAC) explored the issues for systems vendors aound the implementation of 13-digit ISBNs. Those present seemed to have a fair grasp of the implications and we heard some useful background information from a member of the ISO ISBN Revision Committee. A key point for me was that library system vendors should not ignore the possibility that their customers might want to use the 14-digit Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), where the extra digit specifies an aggregation of a particular product such as a carton of the new Harry Potter. More on this when I give my presentation on Monday.

RSS is not just another TLA

2005-01-13T17:02:00.000Z

The quiet appearance of those three letters RSS on the scene back in 1999 was not an earth shattering event, but the uses to which the technology is now being put are growing by the day.

It gave rise to the now infamous podcasting last summer, which allows the automatic download of [or 'tuning in' to] Internet broadcasts or 'Podcasts'. So when you want to listen to your favourite hour of the week, it is already loaded on to your iPod or PC drive.

At Talis, as part of Project Bluebird, we are researching the usefulness of RSS as a way of alerting library users to events that take place in their library account.

The Tony Hammond article in D-Lib on the Role of RSS in Science Publishing and the recent announcement from IngentaConnect of:

in excess of 20,000 new RSS feeds containing the latest table of contents data for the academic journals that are still being actively loaded into our databases. Like our friends at Nature

Now MSN have release a Beta version of RSS Feeds for Search Results. So enter a search into your RSS reader and get alerted when new results turn up!

Cool, so now applying that idea to the library world it won't be long before an OPAC is brought to its knees with all its users' RSS readers polling their favourite subject search for new items!

Whence RSS next?

Open Amazon - lesson for libraries?

2004-12-29T17:36:00.000Z

There's a fascinating article, 'Amazon: Giving Away the Store', in the January issue of Technology Review.

It describes how Amazon.com has opened up access to the riches of its product database via web services, allowing developers anywhere and everywhere to grab data and re-use it to enhance their own sites. Sales have to be routed through Amazon, but the satellite site gets a commission. This exposes Amazon to an even wider potential market whilst outsourcing the development cost and creativity (as well as some of the profit).

Apart from the possibilities for libraries to use Amazon web services, which has been happening for some time, there is a clear parallel here with what libraries and their systems need to be doing with their own content and services: separating presentation from business logic and content so that they can offer their content and services beyond the OPAC in the places where the users are and presented in ways that are appropriate to those places. This renews the old library adage, 'get the stuff to the chaps.'

Much has been written about the chaps being mostly at Google and Amazon and, more generally, in the 'open' web. One example of the open Web that uses Amazon web services is AllConsuming.net, a site that monitors books being discussed in blogs. In addition to the link to Amazon, there should also be an option to find the book in the user's preferred library. This is provided at the independent Amazon Light but, for a global audience, a single list of libraries all over the world is a crude and ineffective mechanism. What it needs is an embedded service linking to a maintained directory of libraries, providing robust links and a good method to enable the user to select their prefered library from the huge number available.

Alerting tools - changing the focus

2004-12-24T09:47:00.000Z

I’ve been reading an interesting article in Dlib about Scientific publishers investigating the use of RSS, this has got me thinking about whether alerting will finally reach mass take-up in libraries: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/hammond/12hammond.html

Profiling and alerting has hitherto been a feature built into the systems that people use, eg ‘provide alerts’ option to watch a topic or subject, or ‘email me’ with new tables of contents as a journal is published.

The increasing availability and adoption of RSS tools is disrupting this model – shifting the tools known by librarians as ‘SDI’ (that’s Selective Dissemination of Information, rather than Strategic Defense Initiative) into the hands of the users. There are now lots of RSS readers available for free download – these are tools that allow users to subscribe to ‘feeds’ (ie changes to a site) and manage the content from these. Systems and web sites are increasingly becoming RSS-aware and publishing RSS feeds. The key advantage for users is that they have a single interface to use to set up and manage their feeds – that’s why RSS will be used where current models aren't. Question is, who’s using RSS to date – is this a tool used by the users of libraries?

I guess this will spawn demand for a new set of tools allowing discovery of and subscription to relevant RSS feeds - maybe aggregation services for the best feeds in a subject?

It also prompts libraries to change the way they think about their content – how can they make their content and services available through ‘push’ technogies?

Suspect the world will change further if Microsoft embed RSS in the next version of IE/Outlook, as expected.

What’s in an I-Name?

2004-12-13T14:55:00.000Z

Up until recently my question was “What is an I-Name” Then I listened to the ITConversations interview with Owen Davis on the subject of IdentityCommons, which underpins I-Names, and it all became clearer.

The simple answer appears to be “DNS, but for people“ I-Names are assigned to people in a similar way to the way Domain names are allocated to their owners. You identify an unused I-Name, pays your money, and its yours! You pay an Identity Service Provider such as 2idi.

I’ve now got mine =Richard.Wallis it only cost me a donation of $25, and it is mine all mine for the next 50 years. That should impress the other Richard Wallises out there, I got in first! It raises an interesting point though, all I-Names are unique, but all people names are not. When was the last time you saw an eBay User Id that was the user’s actual name? But again selecting an identity, or handle, that describes you is an interesting exercise in its self

So what! What can I use my I-Name for, beyond showing off that I have got one by putting it in my eMail signature. Today not much, but it has potential.

As an I-Name is a guaranteed unique universal private address, or identity, it could be used by all sorts of systems to confirm who you are. It picks up on the same ideas as Microsoft Passport, but without the perception of world domination.

I-Names are also applicable to organisations so as well as being able to uniquely identify me, it should be able to identify the me that works at Talis separately from the me that is at home buying stuff off eBay. The same ‘me’ but in two different contexts.

Extending that concept to ‘me’ on a University course context that because of it has licensed access to a particular eJournal, starts to make things interesting. Add to that the possibility of Amazon knowing my I-Name and will then trust me for one-click purchases and things could get very interesting.

So is this the Holly Grail of identity management that will solve all the problems Shibboleth, Athens, WS-Federation, etc. have all tried to address with differing levels of success? I doubt it, as Jon Udell has quiet rightly pointed in his thoughts on the subject

“having spent more hours than I care to admit poring over specs and architecture diagrams from the Passport, Shibboleth, Liberty, and WS-Federation projects, I suspect (as does Doc Searls) that some other identity standard will prevail.”

But there again it could be one of the lights at the end of the tunnel that together will solve the travelling identity problem, and will be so obvious [like DNS is now] after we have all given in and start using the de-facto standards that emerge.

JISC IESR event

2004-12-08T16:04:00.000Z

I've been invited to speak at a workshop orgainsed by the JISC IESR in January.

The JISC IESR - the Information Environment Service Registry - is all about collection and service descriptions. I find the development of collection descriptions an interesting area. It probably stems from my dealings with the RIDING project many years ago at Leeds and Sheffield universities!

I'm particularly interested in their application when it comes to electronic resources. Is there such a thing as a generic description? and what is their true application?

The way I see it is that every electronic resource is being described on web sites and in metasearch tools by libarians all over the world so there must be a need to share those descriptions, but would you take a generic description and then change it? So is it as simple as a download, or is their a more complex need to share?

I guess I better figure it out before the workshop in January!

A vision for the E-Learning Framework

2004-12-07T08:56:00.000Z

The E-Learning Framework is a major international initiative that has important implications for libraries. The UK part of it is the JISC e-Learning Programme supported by CETIS. Where could the international e-Learning Framework be in five years' time? Some of the key international partners have outlined their vision.

Dan Rehak of the Learning Systems Architecture Lab, Carnegie Mellon University in the US

... hopes that in five years time there will be sufficient web service alternatives in each of the ELF service definitions or ‘bricks’ to allow institutions to choose the services most relevant to them and their institutional e-learning infrastructure. We mustn’t lose sight of the ultimate aim which is better learning opportunities for students.

Kerry Blinco and Neil McLean of the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) in Australia

... have an air of confidence that the service oriented approach will succeed. That confidence is probably built on the experiences of working with the Tasmanian Education Department who have successfully built a service based education environment. The Learning Architecture Project (LeAP) is delivering a number of interoperable online applications to enhance teaching and learning in 218 schools and colleges across Tasmania. ...

Neil thinks that the framework is now at the cottage industry phase where academics, software developers and policy makers are involved in its development. In five years time Neil predicts that open source web services will have taken off and there will be a proliferation of teaching applications for people to use. At this stage it is important to keep both academics and software developers involved by using an iterative development process for the ELF that everyone feels that they can be part of.

Neil McLean co-authored, with Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information, a key white paper on Interoperability between library information services and learning environments.

JISC Watching the Semantic Web

2004-11-29T15:46:00.000Z

The JISC Technology and Standards Watch has commissioned a report on Semantic Web Technologies by Dr. Brian Matthews of CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Deputy Manager of the UK and Ireland Office of the W3C. 'This JISC report will discuss the current state of the art of the Semantic Web, how it may impact the UK Higher and Further Education sectors, and how it may develop in the next few years.'

They've also commissioned another interesting report, mentioned on the same page: Future location-based experiences by Professor Steve Benford. This is about digital content adapted to the user's location and delivered to portable or wearable devices through wireless communications. The brief doesn't mention libraries but it set me imagining finding out, through my PDA, the nearest library with an available copy of a book that I'm looking for.

Scientific publications: storm in a tea cup?

2004-11-26T14:13:00.000Z

On Tuesday I attended a UKSG event - Scientific Publications: Free for all?

The day was focused on the much-anticipated report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on scientific publications which appeared in July, and generated a great deal of interest throughout the academic community, libraries and publishers.

The event was very interesting - there were presentations from librarians, and publishers, but my fears were confirmed. The government in its response to the report doesn't think there's a problem, whilst the academics are burying their heads in the sand, or appear to be completely unaware of the flaws with the existing scholarly communication model - yet it is the academics who are at the heart of the process - publishing their research findings in scholarly journals. Why wasn't an academic perspective presented?

It is the academic community which is at both ends of the publishing cycle. Academics publish the content, and they read other's work once published. It strikes me that until they actually comprehend that, then the fundamental model will not change. So while the publishers and librarians discuss the issues around journal bundling, journal prices and the model as a whole, the discussion does not really involve the other key stakeholder - the academics.

Metasearching: a new approach

2004-11-26T10:38:00.000Z

The latest issue of the Library Journal has an article, 'Moving Beyond Metasearching: Are Wrappers the Next Big Thing?', about a $2 million project 'to deliver electronic content no matter where the search is conducted'. The functional ideas are interesting and have the crucial benefit of being easy, intuitive, to use.

But I need to find out about 'wrappers' before I can understand the technology behind it. I must be missing something - from the description given in the article, it sounds like the XML equivalent of html screen-scraping, which the NISO Metasearch Initiative is seeking to get away from. I particularly like the sentence: 'All results from the same vendor are returned in the same layout wherever you search.' It must be true if they're throwing $2 million at it, right?

FRBR News and Prototype Catalogue

2004-11-26T09:26:00.000Z

A new FRBR Prototype Application has been made available on the Web. It is an experimental adaptation of the CDS/ISIS system. The intention is to release the software modules as either freeware or Open Source. Some brief information about the prototype with a few links is available.

The interface simply presents the user with search options based on the primary FRBR entities and the database is very small, but it demonstrates the principles and models the relations between all the entities.

A preprint version of a technical paper is available; it's published in Cataloguing & Classification Quarterly vol. 39 no. 3-4 2004. This is devoted to FRBR and edited by Patrick Le Bœuf of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, who is at the hub of IFLA's work on FRBR. The title of the CCQ double issue is FRBR: hype, or cure-all? There has certainly been a lot of hype about it and Patrick is the first to point out that it is an imperfect conceptual model, but it does seem to offer possibilities to improve the performance of catalogues for key types of material such as literary works and music to better fulfil Cutter's principles.

Scanning the contents list for CCQ 39, 3-4, there are many fascinating articles that I look forward to reading from key players in cataloguing research, but there doesn't seem to be a user study. Given the well-documented user preference for Google's simplicity, I would have thought that those who are investing in the application of FRBR concepts would want to know whether their systems are going to appeal to their intended user-base and how best to design their user interfaces to do so.

RSS - good article

2004-11-22T09:09:00.000Z

RSS offers libraries the potential to deliver services in new ways and to create completely new services, with relatively little effort or cost. What is RSS and how can it serve libraries? [pdf] is a 14 page thorough introduction to RSS, how it works and how it can be applied, with a full section on its potential for libraries. Well worth a read by anyone wanting to be inspired to exploit RSS for library services.
Found via blogwithoutalibrary.

Google's new scholarly literature search

2004-11-18T15:54:00.000Z

Google has just released a beta version of a new service: Google Scholar. According to the information about itself:

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Where a book is referenced, it includes a link 'Library search' to OCLC's OpenWorldCat to find a library location. The FAQ advises users who want to get to full text to visit a library, implying look at a print copy. It doesn't say that, via membership of a library service, you might have access to restricted online content.

Thanks to Paul Miller's CIE blog for alerting me to this. As he points out, there is a good initial reaction on ResourceShelf.

Firefox browser marches on

2004-10-25T08:12:00.000Z

Version 1.0 of the Mozilla Firefox browser is due out soon. Here's an article that sums up why I switched to using Firefox when I first learned about it a couple of months ago.

2004-10-22T20:42:00.000Z

Another interesting piece of work on metadata is just starting. It's a study by William Moen (the Z39.50 specialist at the University of North Texas) called 'MARC Content Designation Utilization: Inquiry & Analysis. Examining Present Practices to Inform Future Metadata Use: An Empirical Analysis of MARC Content Designation Utilization'. In this 2-year project, the researchers will will investigate the extent of catalogers’ use of MARC 21, the mark-up language used by catalogers worldwide to create electronic catalog records. OCLC will provide a sample of 1 million MARC bibliographic records for this project.
The current MARC 21 specifications define nearly 2000 fields and subfields available to library catalogers working to create catalog records for a wide variety of materials. In the Z-Interoperability Testbed Project, Moen discovered strong indications that only 36 of the available MARC subfields accounted for 80% of all subfield utilization. These preliminary findings have important implications for library catalogers, standards developers, and people involved in the machine generation of metadata.

Automatic metadata

2004-10-22T20:28:00.000Z

Just received an email about a new site, www.describethis.com, described as

a service designed for the automatic extraction of metadata from online resources. You can indicate the resource to analyze and how to download the results as XML, XHTML or RDF files.

In the current version (1.0 BETA), the site's engine is able to find the resources to process using keywords, full URLs or more complex queries with operators, like "ISBN", used to collect the bibliographic data for published documents. So it can work as a metasearch engine using other search engines to locate the best sites where the resource can be found. The results returned back contain the automatically generated Dublin Core elements for the requested resource and can be downloaded as RDF, XML or XHTML.
Well worth a look and a play for anyone iterested in metadata.

The wrong browsers

2004-09-08T10:32:00.000Z

For the sake of an interesting title I'm frivolously drawing parallels between the mechanical trousers of the animation film and Internet Explorer, Wallace is any IE user and the fiendish penguin is Microsoft. The diamond that the penguin tries to steal, using the mechanical trousers, is total domination of the browser market. When Wallace, out of control, cries out something like 'It's the wrong trousers, Grommit', that's the user getting hit through a security loophole in IE. A couple of weeks ago I came across discussion on Slashdot about ditching IE due mainly to security concerns. This led me to look up the Mozilla Firefox browser: It sounded so good I had to try it, so I downloaded it to my PC at home (very easily) and set it as my default browser. It imported all my bookmarks and history and I haven't missed anything from IE yet. The built in pop-up blocking and Google search only replicate what I had added to IE from Google, but I really like the tabbed browsing (keeping multiple pages open on tabs). And its less vulnerable to all the nasties that are lurking on the Web. Now I'm using it at work, too. The security issue must be a concern for libraries running IE. I'll be looking out for any news of libraries switching away from IE.

Northern Children’s Book Festival 2004

2004-08-24T10:50:00.000Z

Running from November 8th-20th, this will be the 21st occurrence of this tremendous event, organised by the library services of 12 local authorities in the north east of England. It is Europe’s largest free children’s book event, with top authors, poets and performers visiting schools and libraries in the region and culminating in a gala day. What a great way to encourage reading, inspire children and support schools and libraries. http://www.ncbf.org.uk/

Libraries, blogs and RSS revisited

2004-08-24T10:48:00.000Z

Just to note another excellent introductory article: Ian Winship’s Weblogs and RSS in information work published in the May 2004 CILIP Update.

Service oriented again

2004-08-24T10:45:00.000Z

Following on from last Friday's post I googled for 'service oriented' and opened up a massive new vista on service oriented architecture and web services. Once again it's that experience of trying to take a light drink from a fire hydrant. After a few minutes the most concise and informative article I found is http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html, which is part of a much larger site full of good related technical stuff that is generally at the right level to inform business thinking.

Service-Oriented Frameworks

2004-08-20T15:31:00.000Z

In my opening blog entry I observed how how pervasive the use of technology is becoming in HE teaching, learning and research. I've just come across a recent paper (20 July 2004) on the JISC web site that helps to clarify the kind of coherent technical infrastructure that's needed to support and realise the potential to improve activities in a broad domain, such as e-learning. Service-Oriented Frameworks: Modelling the infrastructure for the next generation of e-learning systems (a PDF) explains an approach to infrastructure development to achieve the integration of a wide range of systems that is needed to realise the desired improvements. In this context, a framework comprises a broad set of services required to support the business of a community. Services are pieces of application logic or behaviour in the various systems - so a library management system could expose the item reservation business logic as a service to be consumed in the institution portal or VLE. Some services may be common to multiple applications and frameworks, for example authentication, authorisation and service registry functions. And typically this would all be achieved using Web Services technology.

Get with the BEAT

2004-08-18T09:35:00.001Z

The Library of Congress Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) celebrated its tenth anniversary this summer. There is an extensive description of their work in the LC Cataloging Newsline (LCCN) vol. 12 no.9 (which I get via email but is not yet posted on their web site). BEAT’s work is about ‘enriching the content of Library of Congress bibliographic records, improving access to the data the records contain, and conducting research and development in related areas.’ Anyone interested in enriching bibliographic records to improve retrieval and presentation should be aware of the excellent work of David Williamson and the BEAT: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat

Serials cataloguing shake-up

2004-08-18T09:35:00.000Z

Another item that caught my eye in LCCN, this time vol.12 no.10, is the announcement of the availability of the recommendations and conclusions from the CONSER Summit on Serials in the Digital Environment, which was held March 18-19, 2004, in Alexandria, Virginia. These are outlined (in some detail) in the summary on the Summit Website at http://www.loc.gov/acq/conser/summit.html. This involved major players from across the serials industry and libraries. There is some fairly radical thinking to make records more useful in the digital environment. This, together with the current turmoil around the future of the ISSN, is going to make for interesting times ahead for serials management.

Metadata format pluralism

2004-08-18T09:32:00.000Z

Libraries must embrace metadata format pluralism or die. This seems to be Roy Tennant’s current theme, whose latest manifestation is his article Metadata leadership, published in the August issue of the Library Journal. He discusses three important players: cataloguers, their bosses and appropriate tools. At least in the UK, it will take a considerable mental u-turn for many library chiefs to realise the importance of metadata, having reduced and downgraded cataloguing staff for many years. On the other hand, one can hope that library schools are recognising the need and are devoting more time and effort to cataloguing, in its new forms, after long neglect. And there seems to be plenty of cataloguing training going, judging from email announcements that I see, not only the Allegro / Ian Ledsham courses but also in the area of educational metadata, which I suspect is often involving people who are not initially cataloguers and where there is also an initiative to address quality concerns, which echo issues that have been addressed over many years in MARC & AACR cataloguing.

Cyberinfrastructure, library groupware and other musings

2004-08-16T17:48:00.000Z

I’ll kick off by summarising a few things that have been new to me recently and have altered my thinking. The JISC-CNI conference in Brighton last month introduced me to the term cyberinfrastructure. It was eye-opening to see real examples from both sides of the Atlantic of how pervasive the use of technology is becoming in HE teaching, learning and research. Even in the humanities, as witnessed by the last two speakers. Most of the presentations are available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-cni-2004/programme.html

Remote access, digital information sources and VLEs I’ve understood in an abstract sense for some time, but it was fascinating and utterly different to my student experience back in the mists of time to see what’s happening in terms of physical technical infrastructure and its effect on both formal and informal teaching and learning. Enormous investment is going into buildings in some institutions for wireless networking, videoconferencing, enabling computing to be an integral part of course delivery and consumption, as well as creative architectural design for formal and social spaces conducive to new ways of learning. The idea of students collaborating on a project in the café, each with their laptop wirelessly connected to the network, was particularly striking. This put me in mind of some ideas in the OCLC Environmental Scan: the idea that those who have recently grown up with computing have attitudes and expectations conditioned by gaming, multitasking and mobile technology; and the idea of the third space, a comfortable informal environment that isn’t work or home but could be the library, which supports people in a neutral and trusted way to satisfy their information needs and collaborate and communicate with each other.

Another new concept (to me) that could form part of the cyberinfrastructure is library groupware. There is an article on this in the latest Ariadne: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/chudnov/ This is about information management for individuals and groups using a set of tools that could constitute a new area of library service that is core to the library mission. It would enable users to manage information in the complex environment of diverse online information resources. The authors consider how library groupware could, for example, integrate link resolvers, bibliographic reference managers and weblogs. This seems like food for thought by library system vendors.

And so to blogging. Penny Garrod’s excellent article in the latest Ariadne - http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/public-libraries/ - has helped me to realise how blogging can be valuable, rather than just another outlet for the confessional urge of some Americans. It took some badgering to get me to start this blog, but I’m beginning to get it after reading this article, which shows how blogging can be beneficial in education as well as how it is being put to creative use by some libraries.

I’ll finish with a few words about another step I’ve just taken into cyberspace: RSS. I’ve been meaning to try it for some while, in the hope of more efficiently keeping in touch with all the news, articles and now blogs that I’m interested in or need to know about. After failing to get a couple of free Windows-based RSS readers working, I tried Pluck - http://www.pluck.com/ -, which integrates into your web browser. It’s excellent, very easy to install and use and does just what I want including some things I hadn’t even thought of. Now I’m building up a stock of RSS feeds and also starting to think about how RSS might be used in library systems.