Posted by Richard Wallis at 12:03 PM
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25 September 2007
Open Data Commons
Here at Talis we are passionate about several things - the power of community, sharing innovation, the place of libraries in the on & off line society of today and tomorrow, taking your services to where your users are, and..... oh yes the The Talis Platform.
As several of my colleagues and I have often said before, one of the key factors holding back our community opening up for the benefit of all is licensing. The contribution of library data to joint initiatives, or the opening up of your data for all to view and use, seems to be fraught with fear and trepidation about the sky falling in if you let your data escape in to the wild.
These concerns were addressed when we launched Talis Source, enabling data freely contributed by libraries to be used for wider purposes, by the Talis Community Licence. As we said at the time:
This draft licence builds upon our existing commitment to free contribution into and basic discovery from Talis Platform-powered applications such as Talis Source, and codifies our intentions for data shared via the Platform in an open and unambiguous manner.
I am therefore delighted to bring to your attention Paul Miller's announcement on our sister blog Nodalities that the process of opening up this licence to the community for all to gain the benefits has taken another major step forward.
Building upon our original work on the TCL, we recently provided funding to lawyers Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde. They were tasked with validating the principles behind the license, developing an effective expression of those principles that could be applied beyond the database-aware shores of Europe, and working with us to identify a suitable home in which this new licence could be hosted, nurtured, and carried forward for the benefit of stakeholders far outside Talis.
Today, Jordan posted the latest draft of this license (now going by the name 'Open Data Commons'), some rationale, and pointers to various ways in which he - and we - are seeking input and further validation.
The principles of Open Data are not only applicable to the library community, but most of the scenarios that would benefit from such a license do crop up as key concerns in or world.
Again as Paul says
As my colleague Rob (again!) has argued, curators of data need an option on the permissions continuum between free-for-all and locked down. The Open Data Commons, née Talis Community Licence, offers that option.
Take a look. Think about how you would use it. Consider what sort of administrative framework you would want behind such a license. Join the conversation.
Posted by Richard Wallis at 05:22 PM
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17 September 2007
Small steps to using the Platform
Chris Keene, Technical Development Manager at the University of Sussex Library, like others, has been interested for a while in what we have been saying about, and doing with the Talis Platform.
He decided to dive in, and has posted the story of the periodic small steps in trying to understand what it can do and how to use it.
In his two postings so far [1,2], he takes us from using the example code, from the Talis Developer Network pages, as a start point to searching Sussex's catalogue, through to building his own search interface based upon the Open Source Cenote code.
Posting two ends with some comments about the html produced - But, all those things aside, it works. He then goes on to promise a third posting - "making it work properly".
Well done Chris! - I can't wait for the next episode.
Posted by Richard Wallis at 06:06 PM
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8 September 2007
Ross Singer joins Talis
Something I have been itching to tell for a while, Ross Singer of Georgia Tech will be joining the Talis team next month. As Ross puts it he will be "Taking off the yellow jacket".
Since sparing with him via this blog, Ross has been on my radar as one of those people who 'get it'. His innovative work at Georgia Tech Library with the Umlaut OpenURL Link Resolver intended to improve access to library collections by contextualizing citations and available holdings more accurately for a given user , was recognized when it won the Second OCLC Research Software Contest last year.
Ross says in his blog:
I am really looking forward to Talis; not only do I think the work they’re doing is exciting and innovative, but, in my opinion, I think it’s the only way to push major ideas into libraries. Libraries are generally too risk-averse to look at the interesting things their peers are doing and adopt them. My work at Tech doesn’t show up in many places outside of Tech. It never will.
A point well made Ross. There is massive innovation taking place in individual libraries, you only have to listen in on the conversations of #code4lib to know that. For all libraries to benefit from this we need to be able to overcome this not invented here reticence as well as the lack of a library geek in thousands of libraries across the world.
Welcome on board Ross I'm looking forward to sharing a coffee with you in Birmingham when you pop-in next.
Posted by Richard Wallis at 09:37 AM
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7 September 2007
A Cataloguing Carry On
Over on The Good Library Blog Andrew Coburn, Chair of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group and Acquisitions & Cataloguing Manager for Essex CC Libraries, chimes in on Tim Coates' theme about the waste of money in recataloguing books which have already been catalogued. In the post Carry on Cataloguing he says
Neilsen Bookdata catalogue all the output of UK publishers, and then both they and BDS (Bibiliographic data services) recatalogue books from the perspective of libraries. That's fine-- but then almost every single library authority in the UK (200 of them) -recatalogue the whole lot to suit their own individual catalogue style. For academic libraries that is ok, but for public libraries that is a complete waste of money and shows total lack of management discipline
Coming from an organisation which has its roots in cooperative cataloguing, I am bound to say that library cataloguers do add value to records that come from the book suppliers, but like Andrew I fail to see the need for 200+ local variations in this. I also fail to see why similar duplication is OK for academia - wasting money is not a good thing, regardless of who's budget it comes out of.
As I say, Talis grew from a cataloguing cooperative specifically instigated to share the load across many libraries. Talis Base, which is already used by about a quarter of UK public and Academic libraries, is the service that resulted.
In addition to delivering high quality records for real-time download into your system, Talis Base allows you to contribute and share records with other libraries and prestigious sources such as the British Library. Unlimited access to the 27 million records available minimises the need for local record creation, and ensures materials reach the shelves quicker – so your staff can focus more on user services and less on cataloguing.
So why recataloguging is such an apparently common process is a matter of amazement to me - doubly so when there is a facility such as Talis Base on hand to share cataloguing effort and practice between the professionals.
In a library context, cataloging is a process to make books easier to find. OK an individual local library may have to add its individual shelf number/mark to a record so that the user can physically find it, but I remain to be convinced that library users in different local authorities use different search techniques.
Posted by Richard Wallis at 05:01 PM
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6 September 2007
Integration, Integration, Integration
To paraphrase the [previous] British Prime Minister Tony Blair - ask me my three main priorities for libraries and I tell you integration, integration integration.
What has prompted this drift in to politically influenced style of proclamation, you may ask. Andrew Pace, that's who - with his post on Hectic Pace, Interoperability Is a Lie.
"Interoperability is the biggest lie in automation today." The word is thrown around as easily and meaninglessly as "friend." Interoperable is, at best, an adjective for standards-based systems, and at worst, a hack to cover up the fact that different systems are not at all meant to speak to one another. The former case is so rare as to make it the exception; the latter case is perpetual job security for systems people.
Don't get me wrong I agree with him. Interoperability is the enabler of integration - we all want our systems, and parts thereof, to Interoperate so that we can end up with an integrated solution. Not 'integrated' as in the monolithic ILS dinosaurs which inhabit most library data centres , but integrated as in having all the systems that I use, both inside and outside of the library, meaningfully talking together without the intervention of a computing degree and/or lots of Sunday afternoons to waste.
Andrew suggests that standards are fundamental to interoperability. In some cases he is right, but a standard doesn't always lead to interoperability. There are loads of examples of what I mean in the world of libraries. Take good old Z39.50 for instance - talk to anyone running a federated search engine and you will soon discover that some things stretch the meaning of the word standard. Then there is Z39.50's cousin NCIP, don't start me on that! Of course there is the ILS vendor who boasts industry-standard APIs - the 'industry' of organizations that have purchased their system that is.
You may think that from this that I am anti standards - far from it. I am very pro standards, but standards at the right level. Industry wide standards, where by 'industry' I mean computing, Internet, or Web. In my recent Talking with Talis podcast interview with the Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, Peter Brantley said [the functions of an Integrated Library System] will be desegregated - unbundled - so that there will be more capacity to choose light-weight versions of these things that can talk to each other on a more services oriented basis through APIs.
What Peter is talking about is light-weight Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). For a good overview of SOA in a library context I can recommend the series of five of posts by Eric Schnell. The standards around SOA - XML, REST, etc., are the ones I believe in. These are the standards that are opening up the wider computing world, well understood by those we need to integrate with.
The word integration has many meanings to many people, and they are all relevant. There is integration with things in the library, from entry gate systems, self-service systems, and booking systems etc.; integration with library system components, OPAC services such as Aquabrowser, and WorldCat Local, management information systems, EDI services, cataloging services, etc.; integration with in-organization external systems such as student registry, institutional finance, CRM and identity systems; integration with virtual learning & learning management systems, student portals, browser plug-ins, resolvers, repositories, etc.; integration with union catalogues, national and international discovery solutions, Google Scholar, LibraryThing, journal aggregators etc. - I could go on and on .....
What we have learnt from the Talis Keystone SOA integration product, is that if you measure your ease of use, barrier to entry and understanding, from the point of view of those outside the library sector you will deliver something that motivates, not hinders, integration projects. An integration tool using open APIs, supported by an open sand-box 'play with it' test area and an open community sharing what they have done with it really drives innovation.
So how do we realize the benefits demonstrated by Keystone for the wider world? - Opening up the Keystone integration infrastructure for more than just Talis systems is one way, sharing and building on initiatives such as John Blyberg's PatREST and the DLF's ILS Abstraction API, is another.
So today Andrew, with the occasional exception such as Talis Keystone, interoperability with systems in the library world is a fanciful notion. With application of experience from the wider SOA world tomorrow will not be that far away.
Posted by Richard Wallis at 12:27 PM
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For some reason someone seems to have pressed the semantic web button in library land this week. The semantic web has been buzzing around the edges of our world, as something that 'should' be relevant, for a while now. Discussions have rumbled around the library mailing lists about the use and relevance of RDF (the metadata model component in the W3C's Semantic Web), could it/would it/should it replace MARC and if so, so what? 
Joshua Ferraro President, Technology for LibLime discusses Open Source library systems in this Talking with Talis podcast. The Open Source alternative to the traditional model of library system purchase has attracted much interest over recent months. Joshua dispels a few myths and clarifies what it is like for a library to go OS.