The twelve months that have elapsed since the previous Online Information Conference has seen an explosion in technologies that influence the information world and life in general.  What was being talked about as up coming trends last year, are now core to the agenda of this years conference.

Conference Chair, Adrian Dale, joins me in conversation to discuss these trends an to explore his hopes for the highlights of this years conference.

I hadn’t previously come across any of Google’s library partners, so it was great to listen to the experiences of Manuela Palafox from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain at the Eurolis seminar Doom or bloom: reinventing the library in the digital age. Complutense originally signed its digitisation agreement with Google back in 2006, and was the first non-Anglo-Saxon (her words) library to join the programme.

Based on books in the public domain, the agreement enables Complutense to offer universal free of charge full-text access to a large number of books. So I, for example, a former student from a Spanish university, can now explore a rich vein of Cervantes books without having to endure the punishing euro-sterling exchange rate.

In digitising Complutense’s public domain books, Google assumed all the costs of digitisation and transportation. Google also created an interface, something they do for all their library partners. In return, Complutense selected and provided the books, as well as technical staff.  The overarching aim was to offer access to the university’s library heritage. It was also perceived as an important part of selling the Spanish language abroad – providing access to the vast number of Spanish speakers in the world.

The process started with an analysis of the collection to determine how many books were out of copyright. They then catalogued 70,000 books and established selection criteria – publication year and physical condition – and formulated workflows and logistics for digitisation. Using PDAs, for example, the selection team stored details of the physical condition of books against the book barcode.

As a result of this herculean effort, thousands of Complutense’s digitised books are already accessible in Google Books. It’s possible to navigate directly to the full text from the catalogue record. There are also links enabling users to buy the book. This is truly how to extract optimal value from materials that were formerly languishing in the library. And even in the short time that they’ve been available, 34% of the materials have already been used.

Meanwhile, Jason Hanley, one of Google’s partner managers who spoke immediately after Manuela, seemed anxious to dispel a number of myths about Google and its work with libraries. On the predominance of English language materials, he pointed out that of all Google’s library partners, 8 are outside the US – 2 being in Japan and the rest, such as Universidad Complutense, in Europe. He also believed the predominance of language, linguistics and literature over STEM subjects to be surprising – I’m not sure why.

The question and answer session at the end, involving both Manuela Palafox and Jason Hanley, may have inadvertently answered the question of Google’s motives in this. It’s not the library world that should be afraid of Google – it’s the competing search engines. Google’s longstanding mission – to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful – has clear benefits not only to library partners such as Universidad Complutense, but to the library world as a whole, and to bibliophiles like me. But Google will be imposing limits on the availability of digitised materials for indexing by other search engines for a certain (undefined in this session) period of time, although Hanley denied that Google was trying to be exclusive (which came across as being more than slightly defensive).

The session was a clear window into the aims and experiences of a library partner, and maybe into Google’s motives as well… As one speaker from the floor noted, what are the chances of any other search engine being able to compete fully with Google in the foreseeable future?.

Having read some documentation recently around the plans of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF) for what they call a “pivot” – a mechanism based on semantic technologies for optimising the value of the BNF’s entire web presence, including Gallica, its digital library, it was great to have the opportunity to hear Dominique Stutzmann from the BNF speak at the recent Eurolis Seminar in London.

The future of the library (Doom or Bloom?) was what the day event was all about, and according to Stutzmann, we’ve already invented it. We’ve got the nice buildings, and so ostensibly the library of the future will be the same as that of today. If the library space vanishes, he argued, it will only be the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy because librarians aren’t confident about what they’re doing. I think he’s really onto something – there is indeed an element of subjective crisis in the problem of the future of libraries. He admitted, though, that Web 2.0 re-presents the user-librarian relationship in quite a fundamental way; the user becomes both publisher and librarian. But users don’t want librarians to disappear. He seems to be saying that our library spaces continue to be successful, so leave them alone but engage with some interesting technological stuff as well, because libraries are well-positioned to do so. He added that users trust libraries with everything including long-term preservation of data, and BNF is clearly poised to exploit that trust, but not for its own ends, but for everyone, in the great universal tradition of libraries.

Stutzmann perceives the potential of semantic technologies very clearly in terms of the user experience – giving everyone improved and accurate access to the information available, and had an impressive array of exemplars to reel off, citing Google Book Search’s use of data mining tools taking city name from search results and pinpointing them on a map, and Bibliosurf’s map of novels as examples. Along similar lines, he demonstrated an interactive map with mashed up data from last-fm to produce a map of composers, where proximity indicates artistic commonality rather than geographical proximity – for example Beethoven is situated alongside Vaughan Williams.

As a Modern Languages graduate, I loved hearing about semantic search developments at the European Library and specifically in their TELplus project, where multilingual search (i.e. a search query with terms from more than one language) has been achieved. Stutzmann was clear that authority data is indivisible from semantic web developments, and that is where the librarian tradition really comes into its own; he demonstrated search results with LCSH headings as a facet on the side-panel. He pleaded with librarians to use metadata to give more accurate access to data.

The only downbeat element to his presentation was a survey carried out at BNF in 2008 to get a clearer picture of their users. A key finding was that the average user of the digital library 48, although there is an overall age range of 14-94. Europeana suffers from the same problem. Funnily enough, when I was out on Saturday night, a friend was saying how almost all the people who queued up recently in Birmingham to see the Anglo-Saxon treasures recently discovered in the West Midlands were white people aged 50+. Stutzmann pondered whether there was anything that could be done about it – does it come down to lifestyle fundamentals?

In the same survey, there was a fascinating finding about Library 2.0. Many users questioned felt that library sites should not be spoilt by the comments of user. They are happier to share their information and collaborate with the librarian than with other users. Obviously this goes against received Library 2.0 thinking, and left me wondering, is that a specifically “French thing”, or do UK users have more in common with their European counterparts than we think?

Aiming high is rarely the wrong thing to do, in my opinion, and Jonathan Purday’s presentation, at the Eurolis Seminar Doom or Boom of Europeana, a digital library offering a single, direct and multilingual interface to cross-domain European cultural artefacts certainly wasn’t short of lofty aims. Europeana isn’t just about making library resources available, it’s about breaking down the cultural institution-based silos right across the European cultural sector, and in the process it has created an exciting online resource for the public, researchers and teachers and learners in education.

It’s easy for British people to forget the risk that the Google Book Project will overshadow non-English artefacts in Europe, and this has been an important concern since at least 2005, when the European Commission launched its Digital Libraries initiative. Initiatives such as Europeana are, in Purday’s words “making available the intellectual record of other languages”. And it will also “harmonise digitisation practices across Europe”. All good stuff.

It was also great that Purday acknowledged that every search now begins with Google, and that if you don’t find material, you think it hasn’t been digitised or it doesn’t exist. I and a number of delegates were left wondering at the end of the session, though, whether the full text of content in Europeana will be exposed to Google, and if Purday could come back on that point, that would be useful.

It’s worth mentioning that every single speaker at the Eurolis seminar mentioned the need to consider copyright harmonisation and Purday was no exception, but he probably deployed the most powerful arguments to support this. We can’t digitise at the scale now technologically possible, he argued, unless we reconsider and harmonise copyright, he said, and that the risk was of creating a “20th century black hole”, whereby we will be unable to represent the published output of “the most documented century” and we will end up with a distorted picture of the past as a result.

I would urge people to take a look at Europeana. The search interface is available in 26 languages, and in the next 2 years they plan to be able to translate search terms on the fly (currently only the interface is translated). Purday demonstrated a search on Don Quixote, which not only came up with an impressive range of book editions, but also images inspired by the work, plus videos, including a 1956 news broadcast in which Salvador Dali recreates a vision of Don Quixote at Moulin de la Galette. Europeana holds metadata in the central index and takes the user back to the original site to look at the full artefact, so decentralised and collaborative in a sustainable way.

Europeana is currently attracting 15,000 users a day. Purday is concerned, though, that most people interested in the site are over the age of 45. He plans to address this by creating an API so users can put Europeana into their own web space, although in discussions afterwards, people wondered whether such a measure would succeed in engaging younger people.

Stephen Abram is Vice President, Innovation for library system vendor SirsiDynix.  He is track keynote speaker for the The Open Movement in Libraries, Technology & Education track, on the third day of the conference.

In this first podcast in our Online Information 2009 series, Stephen first explores the meaning of the, often over used, openness concept.  Are we talking about openness of systems, software APIs, open source, approach, minds, libraries, or a combination of several. of these.

With such a broad topic, it was inevitable that we addressed many many aspects of the influences of technology and attitudes on the way libraries are evolving.  Touching on the library system industry, and how it has and is changing, postulating on the future of libraries, and external influences from our rapidly changing world, this is a great introduction to his presentation an the track it kicks off.

For the uninitiated, NGC4LIB is a library focused mailing list which has a reputation for often engaging in massive discussions and disagreements around the minutiae of future cataloguing and library focused metadata practices.  They have recently been involved in one of these great debates stimulated by the comments of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a recent interview.    As is often is the case on this list, the debate wandered well off topic in to the realms of FRBR and it’s alternatives before being brought back on topic by Jim Weinheimer, who started the conversation in the first place.

A statement in Jim’s contribution caught my eye:

Implementing linked data, although it would be great, is years and years away from any kind of practical implementation

Implementing linked data is already well underway with many groups across the Globe.  For instance there are couple that we at Talis are closely involved with.  Following on from Sir Tim’s interview comments, the British Government are currently running a, soon to be opened, closed beta of data.gov.uk.  Through this site they are not only opening up data in many forms such as CSV, like their American cousins at data.gov, but they are also starting to encode in RDF and publishing it via the Talis Platform which provides a SPARQL (the query language of the Linked Data web) end point.  This approach not only lets anyone download the raw data, but also enables them to query it for whatever they have in mind. If you want a sneak preview of how such data is queried, take a look at some of theses examples.   In a similar vein, metadata from BBC programmes and music is being harvested in to Talis Platform stores.  Again these are open to anyone to innovate with – check out these screencasts  to see some of the early possibilities.

Ah but that is not bibliographic data, I hear someone cry – It’ll never catch on in libraries.  I get the impression from some comments on the NGC4LIB list, that it will not be possible for ‘our’ data to participate in this Link Data web until ‘we’ have predicted all possible uses for it, analysed them, and developed a metadata standard to cope with every eventuality.   There are already a few examples of the library world engaging with RDF and Linked data, one obvious one being the Library of  Congress with LCSH another the National Library of Sweden.  Neither of these examples are encoding the kind of detail you would expect in a Marc record, they are using ontology to describe associated concepts such as subjects.

There has been some ontology development towards this larger goal with Bibo (Bibliographic Ontology Specification).  Although not there yet, Bibo is good enough to be used in live applications whishing to encode bibliographic data.  Such an example is Talis Aspire.  Underpinned by the same Platform as the UK Government and BBC Linked Data services, it uses the Bibo ontology to describe resources an an academic context. 

Alongside data.gov.uk there is a Google Group conversation taking place. The refreshing part of this conversation is that it is between the producers of the data sets, those developing the way it should be encoded in to RDF, and those who want to consume it.  Several times you will see a difference of opinion between those that want to describe the data to it’s fullest, and those that wish to extract the most value from it. “I agree that is a cleaner way of encoding, but can you imagine how complex the query will be to extract what I want!”.  This approach is not unusual in the Linked Data world, where producers and consumers get together, pragmatically evolving a way forward.  Dataincubator.org is an open place where such pragmatic development and evolution is taking place.  Check out examples of a subset of Open Library data. (note this is an example of data, not a user interface).

Another, bibliographic focused, experiment can be found at semanticlibrary.org. From some of the example links on the home page, you can see that building in this way enables very different ways of exploring metadata.  People, subjects, publishers, works, editions, series, all being equally valid starting points to explore from.

Doth the bell toll for Marc and RDA?
Not for a long old time – Ontology like Bibo, and the results of work at Dataincubator.org and semanticlibrary.org, may well lead to more open useful, and most importantly linked, access to data previously limited to library search interfaces.  That data has to come from somewhere though, and the massive global network of libraries encoding their data using Marc ,and maybe soon RDA, are ideally placed to continue producing rich bibliographic metadata.  Metadata to be fed in to Linked Data web in the most appropriate form for that purpose.  There will continue to be a place for current cataloguing practices and processes for a significant period -supporting and enabling the bibliographic part of the Linked Data web, not being replaced by it.

No doubt the NGC4LIB conversation on this topic will continue. Regardless of how it progresses, there is a current need and desire for bibliographic data in the linked data web.  The people behind that desire, and the innovation to satisfy it, may well have come up with a satisfactory solution, for them, whilst we are still talking.

Senior managers in libraries have been managing fluctuating budgets for years now, but have managed to maintain service provision. However, the prospect of deeper financial cuts introduces the real possibility of reductions in opening hours, staff development as well as limitations in resource provision. The decreasing value of sterling will continue to impact UK libraries in what is now an internationalised supply chain, and shifting demands of expectations of students and academics will of course continue to have an impact.

This is how Head Librarians in UK universities currently perceive the oncoming impact of the economic downturn according to The impact of the economic recession on university library and IT services, a report published last month by JISC, SCONUL and UCISA, that seeks to find some of the questions that are taxing most if not all of us about how the UK’s economic problems are going to play out in the academic library sector. The report considers IT services alongside university libraries, and we have blogged about the impact of the recession on IT services on our Education blog.

To pretend that the recession somehow marked the start of budgetary restrictions in academia would be to mythologise the recent past, and this report doesn’t fall into that trap, quoting one respondent to the study from the Head Librarian of a post-1992 university:

I’ve had year on year cuts every year I’ve been here… but what we’re facing now actually is nothing new for us. We’ve had hefty audit difficulties but we’re through that now, but [the audit difficulties] resulted in fall backs, which resulted in budget cuts. So I’m quite expecting 09/10 to be difficult; I’m expecting 10/11 to be more difficult, but it’s within a context of never having much fat on the bones anyway. I know I’m going to cope with it because I’ve been doing it for the last seven years, I’m not coming from a position of plenty to a position of poverty.

An opportunity for review?

But lest we should feel that we’re on a never-ending downward spiral, the report is clear that the library service remains essential to the institution’s core mission of learning, teaching and research. And although there is realism that the “achievable” cost reductions of 2009/10 will give way to much more challenging conditions, there is also a sense of “looking at the bright side”, i.e. seeing an opportunity to review current practices and services to ensure that they remain fit for purpose:

It’s an opportunity for us to look at what we do well, where we have maximum benefit and add true value to activities both that are delivered by this department and also that this department contributes to the faculties and to other departments in the university. [Pre-1992 University]

It’s all the more praiseworthy, given the chronic budgetary challenges that university libraries have endured, that a shift to a more customer-focused service has nonetheless been achieved. It’s all the more remarkable that one of the principal manifestations of this transformation has been a breadth of service provision, with cataloguing and collections management giving way to “a service that delivers a wide range of information management tools across a very broad spectrum of format”.

Social learning spaces at risk?

The physical library building is a huge element of this service transformation. As the report notes:

Changing the physical space of the library so it works better for students has consequently increased their use of the library space (but not necessarily the library resources). So with the shift of resources online, evidence suggests students are now spending more time within library buildings than they have in the past; the library has become a social study space.

The ability to continue to improve and develop social learning spaces, as recommended by the report, may well be compromised by capital budget cuts, which according to the report, are more likely to be impacted than recurrent spend. Estate budgets including storage and social learning spaces may well be endangered, although the acknowledged status of social learning spaces as market differentiators in the competition between institutions to attract students, may mitigate to an extent.

With library design and service enhancements such as extended library open hours now at risk, the problem as I see it is the difficulty of taking away something that has previously been given, a problem that is all the more acute when applied to something that is perceived as an entitlement. So these changes, should they occur, will require delicate handling, especially in the customer-centric services now offered on all campuses.

Rationalising resources?

Another fundamental aspect of academic library provision discussed in the report is information resources. Most libraries are planning to renegotiate their journal portfolio and software licences in coming years, and are also prepared to cut journal subscription and book purchase in preference to staff losses. The impact on university life of cancelled subscriptions has yet to be evaluated, although the report does point out that reductions in spend will have a knock-on effect of weakening library purchase power in the supply chain.

In the meantime, libraries are prioritising measures such as consortial purchasing alongside JISC collections, and also the emerging Open Access model, as a combined means of managing costs in journal subscriptions. Whilst the report suggests liaison with academics to identify e-resources that could possibly be discontinued due to insufficient use, the widespread licensing of national deals can hinder rationalisation of individual titles.

On top of global price increases, UK university library spending power has also been adversely impacted by the drop in the value of sterling. The report notes that no university has developed a plan to mitigate for the impact of currency fluctuations (a problem that extends beyond the library) even though it is a source of concern to everyone.

A choice of two negatives?

Of course we don’t know for certain how the budgetary challenges will impact the university library; all that the report has done is to open up the minds of Library Directors and synthesise the findings, valuable though that certainly is. But the report makes a number of general points that are applicable whatever the outcome.

Firstly, the report points out that libraries will need tools at their disposal for assessing their impact, value and costs, as the sector as a whole comes under increased costs pressure.

And secondly, libraries will inevitably have to make a choice between carrying out multiple cuts across the whole range of services or identifying entire areas to cut instead. The multiple cut scenario entails a risk devaluing the overall offering, and dashing user expectations right across the board. On the other hand, cutting an entire service area, even if it’s a real minority taste, is bound to cause pain.

A choice of two negatives – let’s hope that the future offers more than this.

Librarians are better at enhancing the end-user experience in physical libraries than in virtual services.

This was the intriguing opening to an engaging presentation by Anne Karine Sandberg at Internet Librarian International, and the second half of the next generation OPAC session, the first half of which has been previously blogged.

Anne and her colleagues at Oslo Public Libraries wanted to explore the potential reuse of cataloguing data and to create library mashup applications to make use of open content, with the ultimate objective of…  you guessed it, enhancing the end-user experience.

They agreed that the mashups created should not favour one system, but should make use of SRU, MARC and Z39.50. And because Koha is the best known Open Source integrated library management system in Norway right now, they installed Koha, imported their cataloguing data, and used it as a basis for their work.

Anne demonstrated one of their mashups – Trip Planner. By mashing up data from the catalogue, GeoNames, Google Maps, Encyclopaedia Norvegua, Open Library and weather forecast data, they’ve created a nice application whereby users can search for a location (London was used as the example) and get a broad sweep of information from diverse sources – population; currency; language courses; travelogues; fiction; cultural history; today’s weather; Google Map.

In their next phase of work, Oslo Public Libraries will be focusing on converting the cataloguing data from MARC to FRBR. This isn’t just about creating further mashups, although it introduces the possibility of mashups in the realm of fiction, which would certainly work in a public library context. It’s also about seeing what difference that makes to the catalogue display, and to the search experience.

It would be interesting to find out more about how Oslo’s users are benefiting from the work, especially as this was the starting point of this initiative.

Internet Librarian International last week ran a session on next generation catalogues. In the first presentation, Peter Bryant spoke about what he termed “Adaptability, aboutness and authenticity”. Peter is a Learning and Development Tutor at Middlesex University, and specialises in work-based learning, which, he says, is fundamentally about reflection. Peter doesn’t tell his students what is and what isn’t authentic information. Similarly, he didn’t actually tell us how he defines authentic information. This was a problem according to all the people I spoke with after the session, and is certainly a problem when trying to critique his ideas, many of which hung off this word “authentic”.

Peter also dislikes reading lists, on the grounds that “Just because I like something, doesn’t necessarily mean my students will too.” Instead, he believes it is his responsibility, as a teacher, to allow students to form their own ideas of what is authentic. Moving onto linked data (which he does briefly), Bryant is more interested in how we construct authentic knowledge than in the linkage itself.

Does Bryant believe, then, that everything is down to subjective evaluation? Is Dan Brown as “authentic” as Jane Austen in his view? Thankfully not. By presenting a problem – namely, how do we know that Kohl (for example) is the man in a given discipline? – Bryant makes it clear that there is, in fact, a very real and valuable hierarchy in any discipline, but that we may be going the wrong way in determining that hierarchy. Currently, Google uses citation counts. There is also an academic hierarchy – we talk about Tier 1 journals, for example. Finally, we have the scenario that Bryant has already implicitly attacked – where the academic tells us who we should read. These are the systems we have in place, Bryant says, but do they determine the “authenticity” of information?

In his experience, many learners don’t have ready access to the library or even the internet, and in any case traditional tools aren’t useful for reflection-centric work-based learning. A Community of Practice is, in Bryant’s view, much more valuable. This has repercussions for the next generation catalogue. He wants his students to use mechanisms such as blogging – they blog about what resources they’re using, and at the same time follow each others’ blogs, and in this way authentic knowledge is constructed.

I’m not sure I agree with this. Staff at Talis, for example, can only go so far down the road to relativism, in which the value of information is largely determined by the subjective way in which it’s received. That’s because in technology, machines either work or they don’t work; it doesn’t matter whether I personally find the information “authentic” or not – a more objective correctness is very important. But is that unique to technology? My brother is a chef. To what is his professional development about reflection? Well, there is certainly a large element of good practice that he has to master. But recipes either work or they don’t. A soufflé will rise according to chemistry and whether the process followed by the chef is correct. So if people in certain professions don’t have access to the internet or to a library of good quality resources, to what extent can we work around that? Is it acceptable to use Communities of Practice as some sort of substitute for good quality resources? Or is there in fact a need for both in equal measure?

The development of students’ critical faculties with regard to information resources surely hinges upon their respective relationships with lecturers and libraries.

Issues around information literacy and the role of the lecturer are pertinent here, but surely that is about a three-way partnership between the lecturer, the student and the library. The lecturer points to certain key resources for a module, as a signpost to quality and significance. The student consumes those resources. The lecturer strongly encourages and incentivises the student to develop research skills to unearth other good quality and relevant resources. The library ensures that all those resources are available to the student at the point of need. If any one of those elements is taken away, I would say that the student’s development in any discipline will suffer in some way, and it would be wrong to make a virtue out of it.

At home we are more or less obsessed by The Sopranos right now. Any spare hour means a Sopranos episode, and we’re currently about halfway through Series 3. My fairly late return from Internet Librarian International last night provided us with the opportunity to watch two more episodes, including one entitled “University” that focused on Meadow Soprano’s experiences at Columbia University. So we’re very early into the new millennium, and I’m struck by how much time Meadow is spending at the university library, sitting at some table in front of a pile of books.

My point is that until I heard Tony Hirst speak at Internet Librarian International, I might have thought of the invisible library in that now-familiar “library without walls” kind of way. Undergraduates at Columbia may no longer be magnetised by the library building, and instead will be consuming more information on the go – in their room, at Starbucks, back at the parental home, and so forth, as the e-resource revolution continues to transform the learning experience everywhere.

But Tony Hirst didn’t even use this as his starting point. I’ve learnt, from following his blog, that you can rely on Tony to move a familiar concept way beyond its former position. So instead of taking us through tired old scenarios of ubiquitous information resources, Tony made us think more deeply about the idea of invisibility. He conjured up a familiar fairy story, The elves and the shoemaker, to represent the library as a shop fronting the wares of other people.

He also introduced us to the Invisible Theatre, in which a troupe will set up in a non-theatrical environment such as a shopping centre, and will perform a scenario which the “audience” i.e. passers-by won’t even perceive to be a performance as such. They may draw those people in to some discussion, and then quietly tip-toe away, having acted as an unacknowledged catalyst of a social situation. I used to perform street theatre myself, back in the early 1990s in Manchester, but it was very much a performance. Tony’s description of the invisible theatre reveals how much more participative street theatre has become in the intervening period, and my take is that libraries are making the same shift, breaking down the barriers between the library and its users.

Along more technological lines than elves, shoemakers and street performers, Tony spoke about tools that are rendered invisible through their seamless integration into other services. Google Scholar is a great example of this. Anyone can search for articles, but Google Scholar is able to determine, without the user realising, access entitlements, and if the user is from, say, a university with a subscription to the e-journal in question, then the user will simply experience seamless access to the full-text. That’s precisely the kind of invisibility that we’re all working towards. It can be problematic because in the National Student Survey, for example, you might not be converting a complaint to a compliment. Instead, a library service or tool will be something that the library user is unknowingly dependent on, but the point is that they are dependent on it, and they are actually dependent on it being invisible, and that’s the business case.

He also urged internet librarians everywhere to go with the flow. On Twitter it’s possible to do a search on the tweets of specified users for keywords such as “how” and “libraries”, and thereby tap into a rich source of useful tips. Today’s information environment is all about flows of information and we should all be engaging in it.

Finally, he warned us about being invisible “in the wrong way”, for example by setting up a repository that isn’t exposed to Google.