Over on LibrarianInBlack.net Sarah Houghton says

RedLightGreen and Talis have partnered up. They’re sharing the “find it at a library” data directory and they point out that participation in this open library project, unlike Open WorldCat, does not require that the library be a FirstSearch subscriber and pays to put their records into the database. Libraries are included, for free (free, I say it again) in RLG’s “find it” database. I’ve found RLG’s database to be smaller in terms of titles, but with a better interface, better authority control, FRBRization (which is awesome), a faster search engine, and more features. Can’t we have the best of all worlds in one product?

That’s a great question. Why can’t we have the “best of all worlds” in one product.

I don’t think the “best of all worlds” in one product will ever be achieved by a single supplier working in a defensive and closed manner, it simply doesn’t make economic sense.

But it can be and will be achieved by vendors adopting a mature approach to collaboration between competitors and other organisations such as RLG. Through collaboration and competition costs can be driven out of the market allowing vendors to achieve better services and more innovation for less cost. This has got to be good for the ultimate customers.

Talis first raised this vision in the Silkworm white paper and we immediately started to walk the walk by engaging with all our main competitors including OCLC, and have created Talis Additions and Talis Connexions partner programs. We have had a very positive response from our direct competitors (two have already signed up to the connexions program) but almost a brick wall from OCLC. It is frankly surprising that a not for profit organisation is less willing to collaborate for the benefit of shared customers than our direct head to head competitors. Just to make it clear, we would love to collaborate with OCLC.

In fact we have had such a positive response to the Silkworm ideas from the industry and vendors that we have developed this vision further into what has been labelled Library 2.0.

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In this post, Jon Udell talks about the lack of adaptive intelligence in operating systems. For example if I always open explorer and go to the same folder it would be nice if my computer learned that this was my behaviour and adapted to it, but today there are very few examples of this.

This kind of adaptive intelligence is what most people always expected of computers, and its failure to materialize accounts for their widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.

It strikes me that adaptive intelligence based on the behaviour of just one persons actions is not going to add much value. In the end, most of the customisation I would like can be achieved by setting defaults and preferences.

Maybe the real potential of adaptive intelligence is when it is applied across many users, call that collaborative intelligence. We see simple examples of this in Amazon’s people who bought this book also bought these. Amazon has tracked the activities of millions of users of the system and extracted very valuable new information from the patterns of behaviours. flikr or del.icio.us are also great examples of collaborative intelligence.

It is not hard to imagine the value of extracting patterns from the use of a corporate shared file system or even allowing users to add tags to files on the shared drive to create a folksonomie type view of the system rather than the traditional file hierarchy.

The applications in the research community of tagging more than just websites could be huge. Of course this is difficult to do today as a lot of the information is in databases and you cannot book mark the entry and even if you could, the real value is when the collaborative intelligence is built into the applications you are using.

It is within the end user application that collaborative intelligence intersects with the individual context. Synthesising these two worlds, the collaborative and the individual will surely take us a long way down the road of adaptive intelligent applications. Maybe we should call these semantic applications?

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For me, the best thing about the first Talis research day was talking with and sharing ideas with other interesting and interested people. I hope everyone who came gained as much as I did.

Collaboration, participation and sharing is the essence of Silkworm. Sounds nice and fluffy doesn’t it. Not a bit of it, from hugely successful
Amazon to the fast growing sites of flickr and del.icio.us, participation is proving to be an incredible force for innovation. Innovation is what the Talis research group is all about, and it is my great fortune to be leading the research group at such an exciting time.

In the Silkworm white paper I set out the principles driving the development of Silkworm at Talis, and give an overview of the technology and architecture of the platform. The silkworm.talis.com site is designed to allow as many people to get involved with Silkworm as possible. Here you will find discussion forums, news, examples and presentations.

On the Silkworm blog you will hear the thoughts, views and ideas of those in the Silkworm team. Let us hear what you think by signing up on the forums and getting involved.

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In this post, Lorcan Dempsey rightly draws attention to the great work done by the University of Sunderland in creating a coherent and high impact web experience.

For many institutions their web presence represents an incredibly important point of contact between the students and the services they need.

One of the most exciting aspects web based systems is the ability to mix together services from different systems to create an entirely new experience. Physical buildings like the library or the lecture hall don’t really like being ripped up and mixed together, but the ability to surface library services in different ways, be that in the institutional portal or CRM system, creates a world of new possibilities and challenges.

Talis Prism, the system in use at the Library in Sunderland, has always been an extremely flexible product with advanced user interface configuration, but no matter how hard you try you won’t find a configuration setting that turns the Prism OPAC into a CRM system. Of course you need a different approach. Prism today allows you to surface functionality where and when you want it (for example, University of Birmingham, University of Portsmouth) using REST and WSDL based web services and Project Keystone aims to make this much easier including toolkits for portal and other systems integration. But as Richard Wallis describes in You’ll wonder where the Library went, the technical challenge is often the easier bit.

This remixing of services isn’t even limited to the institutions own systems. Services such as www.redlightgreen.com or www.whichbook.net and many others, need to deep link into the library service. Enabling robust integration between systems inside and outside the institution is another level of challenge again. You can read more about how the Talis Research Group is solving some of these problems in my recent post, Taking aim at deep linking problems with OPAC directory services.

I personally can’t wait to see what gets remixed next.

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As Paul Miller writes here, taking the library experience to where the user is rather than expecting the user to come to the library, virtually or physically, can be extremely beneficially. His experience of using tools to deep link into library systems is unfortunately not unique though,

For various reasons, though, a number of the libraries listed on Jon’s pages don’t work. In many cases, it would appear that they’ve upgraded or changed their software since being listed. For the user, this failure is frustrating and a disappointment. It also, I would think, negatively affects their perception of the library in question rather than of Jon or his tool.
Whilst it is true that where the ‘blame’ rests should absolutely not be a concern of the user, there must be a concern for institutions who find themselves linked to by third parties in this way. LibraryLookup provides an innovative and valuable tool… when it works. Jon has done all of us a service by creating it. It would appear, though, that the libraries listed on his page have not necessarily been informed of their inclusion, and it is they that attract the opprobrium of users when it doesn’t work.

As more library services become available for linking to, and they become a more important route into the library (see Richard’s blog), the problem of control and quality is only going to get worse. Even now there are a surprising number of systems that link, or try to link, deeply into the library OPAC, for example www.redlightgreen.com, OCLC WorldCat, WhichBook.net and many different bookmarlets or browser plugins.

How does a library inform these third parties of a change to their systems? In most cases the library doesn’t even know there is another system depending on the exact syntax of their OPAC url! Let alone being able to inform them of changes.
For the third-party system there is an expensive array of changing urls and syntaxes to be maintained.
At Talis we didn’t feel this was a very scalable solution to our customers needs. So, working with partners RLG (RedLightGreen), the Talis Research group, as part of the Silkworm project, have built a prototype OPAC deep linking directory. RLG is now using the directory live for a subset of its OPAC links.

The directory provides a single point of control and change. It hides the details of both physical location (i.e. URL) and syntax from the linking client (such as RLG). This way the client doesn’t need to know if the OPAC is a Talis OPAC or another vendors OPAC, it just links, using OpenURL and the library ID. The library can now mange the migration of systems by simply updating the directory entry as needed. Talis is looking to work with other vendors to ensure the best coverage and quality for the entries as possible. Commercial access to the directory will be available via the Talis Developer Network
Libraries increasingly want to expose far more than just the OPAC interface to the world, so the Talis directory is not limited to OPAC linking. For example, z-targets or web services for access to borrower details could be added to the directory. We will be talking more about this at the Talis Research Day.

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