Dave Pattern the well known Library 2.0 proponent and SirsiDynix Horizon system manager from Huddersfield University has highlighted a contradiction with the use of the term ‘worldwide’ in a press release about Horizon 7.4.2.

As Dave points out, although the use of the term worldwide is used a couple of times in the release about new functionality “the reality is that Horizon 7.4.2 is a North American only release”  

One could be charitable and put this down to marketing department force of habit, as I imagine they always try to refer to their worldwide customer base, but nevertheless it must add to the frustration (apparent in comments to Dave’s post) of non US-centric customers who I’m sure would love some of these new features. 

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As reported by Bookseller.com, Amazon has launched it’s print on demand (POD) programme in the UK. From Amazon’s press release:

Using proprietary POD technology, Amazon can rapidly print and ship a single book in response to a customer’s order. Titles in the programme will effectively always be in-stock, allowing customers to benefit from Amazon’s shipping offers such as Prime (Amazon’s membership programme offering unlimited one-day delivery) and Free Super Saver Delivery, and publishers and authors to benefit from increased sales.

Amazon POD also provides a cost-effective way for publishers to offer titles for sale that might otherwise not be available to customers – out-of-print works, niche titles, custom books, foreign language editions and alternative formats such as large print. POD further benefits publishers by eliminating the risk of large print runs and the cost of maintaining inventory.

Leading publishers in the UK and around the world are working with Amazon.co.uk to offer their titles via its POD service, including Faber and Faber, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., HarperCollins UK, Cambridge University Press and Allen and Unwin Australia.

"Working with publishers, we hope to bring hundreds of thousands of books to Amazon.co.uk’s customers that might never have otherwise been available,” said Christopher North, Vice President of Media at Amazon.co.uk. “POD not only enables publishers to keep more titles in-stock at Amazon, but it also makes possible innovative new approaches to publishing.”

So you will now be able to get out of print books delivered to your door – at one time you could only get them from your library or by speculatively browsing around your local second-hand book store.  The world is a changing….

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The promise of everyone having their own portable eBook reader to tote around has been bubbling for a long time – Wikipedia points to the late 1990s.  There have been many promising product releases, the latest being Amazon’s Kindle.  The Kindle and its predecessors have attracted ever increasing publicity and consequentially people prepared to invest their hard earned cash to get one.  Nevertheless none of them can really be considered as getting beyond the early adaptor stage.

As reported by Forbes.com, a free to download software add-on for a mobile phone is already outstripping the potential of Amazon’s flagship eBook Reader.  Stanza from Lexcycle is freely downloadable from the Apple App Store:

Read electronic books on your iPhone and iPod Touch! With a reading interface that is unprecedented in its clarity and ease of use, Stanza is bringing the eBook revolution to your pocket. Store and categorise hundreds of books in the organizer, choose from thousands of free books available in the Lexcycle Online Library, and transfer books you share from your computer using Stanxa Desktop.  Your entire summer reading, your class syllabus for the whole year, or all the reference material you will ever need: all at your fingertips. Literally.

As they report there have been more than 395,000 downloads from the App Store and continues to be installed at a rate of about 5,000 copies a day.  Comparing this with Citigroup’s estimate of that there will be around 380,000 Kindle sales in 2008, places this in perspective.

OK the iPhone screen is small compared with some dedicated book readers, but with the iPhone screen quality and the natural feeling of the iPhone user interface, this looks like it could fit in to the ‘good enough’ category of book reader applications.  Add to that that, it being on your phone so you are likely to mostly have it with you and it is free so ‘why not give it a try’.  I think there may well be the possibility of a break through success on the cards here.

Take a look at the video from the Lexcycle people [Quicktime][Flash], it’s really quite impressive.

I also note the following from their site:

Stanza is also the first program that has a built-in export feature especially for the Amazon Kindle. Your PDFs, Word documents, and other eBooks can all be exported to the Kindle’s native format and copied over to the device using a USB cable. Get a paper-quality reading experience for all your electronic documents with this innovative new device!

Last, but not least, Stanza has an experimental new feature that allows you to export your books to MP3 audiobooks. Your entire audiobook can then be added to iTunes and synchronized with your iPod or other digital music player. This technology enables the blind and visually impaired to enjoy a wealth of electronic documents.

I wonder how long before it will import Kindle format?  At the rate of adoption and Amazon’s business model being based on selling the content, not necessarily the method of consuming it, they may already be helping Lexcycle do it – or there again as a company founded by an act of datsusara, somebody’s change of career could well end up with them working for Amazon.

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OLE – The Open Library Environment Project has been around for about a year now, and I am guilty of not monitoring as closely as I would have liked to.  So the opportunity to listen to their recent webcast seemed a great way to get up to speed again. 

Following the instructions on the OLE Project site to replay the webcast, led me to one of the most unusual webcast playback experience I’ve had for a while.   To see the slides you have to click through to a service run by Adobe Acrobat, which provides a good representation of the webcast environment, complete with chat traffic in real time.  The problem then is that you have to use the telephone system to get the audio.  This is not a cheap exercise for those of us having to dial international – at least with Skype Out you can keep the costs down a bit.  Synchronising the listening with the viewing is then a bit of a challenge, especially if you have to pause and restart.

Anyway enough about the experience – what about the content?

What is clear is that the Mellon Funded Project has got a great deal of attention and significant partners from academic and national libraries.  They also have a challenging and worthy goal, which they are taking significant early steps towards:

“By the end of our project, we will have a design for a next-generation library system using Service Oriented Architecture. We also will have built a community of interest that can be tapped to help build the OLE framework.”

The webcast inevitably, especially in the QA section, swung between the low-level detail, the strategic approach, and things like privacy which are more the policy concern of potential implementing libraries than the project itself.

Having listened to it, it is clear that they are working on an assumption that implementing libraries would have to throw their current investment in commercial or open source systems away and build all this from scratch – this being based on experience with the current generation of systems not being capable of integrating easily, or not  dealing with electronic resources.  That is a heck of a large chunk to bite off, even if you pull in things like circulation and cataloguing from other projects.

Experience also calls me to strongly question the emphasis on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), that is if SOA is being used as generally understood as against a generic term for systems being connected via web-style calls.

A bit of background on that ‘experience’ I mention – There are [in general terms] two approaches to Web Services – tightly coupled SOA, and loosely coupled REST based services.  The difference being that a SOA developer/integrator trying to embed the service in to their application needs access to web service descriptions and other enterprise integration tools. Whereas in the RESTful world, integration calls can often be tested using a web browser, and integrators/developers need no more development tools than they currently use.

Both SOA & REST have their benefits and their, sometimes religious, proponents.  With our first use of SOAP (the underlying messaging protocol for SOA) back in the late 1990’s I have been using both of these competing approaches for some time.  Talis over that time has developed and rolled out and established a significant user community for a product known as Talis Keystone.  Keystone is a web service integration component designed to enable external enterprise services (Student Registries, Finance Systems, Student Portals, e-payment services, CRM systems, etc.) to easily and reliably integrate library system data and functionality into their workflow. 

Keystone is now in use in many Talis customer libraries, and with some from libraries with a system from another vendor, in the UK.  Successful integrations have been completed with products such as: Aggresso, Civica, Oracle, and SAP finance systems; Microsoft Sharepoint, uPortal, Moodle, and Blackboard learning and portal environments; and WorldPay e-payment services.  Integration with systems from other suppliers are already in the pipeline.

From day one, Talis Keystone has had the capability to support both SOA and RESTful integration. It maybe useful for projects such as OLE to reflect on the experience in rolling out these integrations, and the take-up of the REST and SOA options.   The vast majority of these integrations have taken the RESTful approach, with only one or two going for SOA.  There are many reasons for this, but they all fall under the heading of there being a much lower barrier to implementing REST than SOAP.  Pragmatically I am of the opinion that lack of SOA capability would not have prevented any of these integrations taking place, whereas if SOA was the the only choice many would not have been undertaken at all. 

I/We would be more than happy to share some of these experiences in implementing and rolling out a product that addresses many of the concerns of the OLE Project.

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There has been much comment following the launching of legal action by Thomson Reuters against George Mason University, and their latest release of the Zotero browser plugin which includes the ability to import EndNote styles.

There has been an interesting thread of conversation on my earlier post on the subject - Thomson Reuters Sends Zotero a $10 Million EndNote.  I am especially intrigued as to the real identity/loyalty of the person who only identifies him/herself as ‘Anon’.

Because the main users of Zotero are to be found in academic institutions, this topic is of great interest to those addressing the issue of applying Internet, Web, Social Networking, Semantic Web and other emerging technologies to the world and practice of education and learning.

It is hardly surprising therefore that our sister blog Project Xiphos, has also covered this topic in a post The $10 million question…, which has received a thoughtful comment from Richard Karnesky.

While you are over on the Project Xiphos blog, I recommend a scroll through some of the other posts.  It is starting to evolve in to a really good heads up on thinking and initiatives in the education, learning and research space.   It reminds me of the early days of Panlibus when we were exploring the influences and thoughts that led towards Library 2.0.

I would particularly recommend some of the Xiphos featured Talking with Talis podcasts, and Sarah Bartlett’s post about the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

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I’ve turned my hand to many things over the years, but book reviewing had so far not been one of them.  Having recently read The Change Function by Pip Coburn, I was asked to give an overview to some colleagues as to what it was all about.  What better way to do this than write a review.  I have found the premise of the book simple, useful, and easy to apply to situations both inside and outside of Talis.   I would recommend it as a read to anyone involved in building products and services. For those not inclined to read it yet, I though I would publish my review to a wider audience.  - I’m still not convinced that reviewing is one of my strengths, but here we go anyway.

The Change Function

The Change Function - in the title of Pip Coburn’s 2006 book, analysing why some technologies take off when others don’t, is a deceptively simple formula that he has developed to help explain the phenomenon.

Pip’s background is in advising technology investors in his own company Coburn Ventures and previously as managing director and global technology strategist in the technology group of UBS Investment Research, from where he has been able to observe the introduction of many and analyse why some succeed and some, as he puts it, crash and burn.

The Change Function:     f(perceived crisis vs total perceived pain of adoption)

The function comes at the problem of identifying the success of a technology by looking at it from the point of view of the users of that technology - the users.  Obvious you may think, but as he shows not always as obvious as you might think to those that are trying to launch new technologies to a world of prospective adopters.

Applying the function helps to get inside the heads as to what users really want, looking for ways to reduce the total perceived pain of adopting a new way of doing things.  As Pip puts it we want to understand the crisis at the adopter level, or specifically how a new offering solves a problem such that the pain in moving to a new technology is lower than the pain of staying in the status quo.

He highlights how often technologists forget how large the gap is between them and real people, many of whom resent technology.  The “build it and they will come” thinking prevails in the world of technologists.   The ‘Technology happens’ philosophy, driven by Moore’s Law and others drives a theory of technology gets faster, cheaper, so therefore will naturally happen.   The theme of The Change Function is that these factors often are needed to help things happen, but they don’t make them happen.

A good example of this is the Personal Computer - the real kick in the adoption curve for the PC didn’t come when it became cheap enough or powerful enough, but when the Graphical User Interface made it easy for most to operate it.

The crisis word in the function is, as Pip acknowledges, is not an ideal word for what he is describing but he hasn’t found a better one.  It covers a multitude motivations from, ‘I need to be more productive’, through ‘My company needs the edge on market intelligence to succeed’, to ‘I feel left out because everyone else seems to have an iPod’.  As with most motivations in life the ‘crisis’ is often more perceived than real, but that makes it no less of a driver for change.

On the other side of the function Pip places pain of adoption, and again uses the perceived word.  The pain of adoption, from the technologists point of view, is often very low - they produced it, they understand it.  This is opposite from the potential users’ point view who often don’t understand either the technology or the technologists.

Pip also introduces total to perceived pain of adoption (TPPA).  This is important because often some user’s perceived pain is not obvious to technologists - feeling stupid because you have to ask your eight year old how to operate a new gadget can be a greater pain than the cost of purchasing it.
Much of the book is taken up with drawing valuable lessons from examples of successes and failures.

For example The Tablet PC - launched in 2001 by Bill Gates, but sales yet to take off.  A cool piece of technology enabling people to interact with a portable PC using handwriting recognition capabilities.  Great for drawing etc., but a whole new ball gate to learn how to use and interact with the traditional office applications everyone are always using.  There is little or no crisis in the minds of the purchasers of PC’s that would drive them towards a Tablet PC purchase.  The is a high TPPA - they would have to learn a new way of interacting with the device - humans don’t like having to learn new ways to do things.

Salesforce.com is an example of an organisation who’s success is based on keeping the TPPA to a minimum.  The crisis for Salesforce’s  potential customers, in capturing, tracking and capitalising on the data from the relationships with their customers, is well known and has fostered a whole industry of CRM system suppliers.  CRM systems have a reputation for being difficult to implement and maintain - purchased by senior executives and forced on the their organisations.  Salesforce’s approach is to work with the users and not the executives; signing up users on line and allowing them to try out the system, and evolving the system with the users, trying new features with them.  Coupled with a subscription purchasing model that can be cancelled at any time.  TPPA is low in a known high crisis situation.

Towards the end of the book, pip lists ten sets of questions to ask to illicit if an organisation is aware of the issues raised by the Change Function, which are eye-opening to ask your self.  He closes with a What to do? chapter indicating a way forward for those convinced by his arguments.

Just having The Change Function rattling about in the back of my head over the few weeks since reading Pip’s book has thrown new light on day to day questions about how and why things should be designed and delivered - a required read for anyone, and everyone, associated with trying to change the way people do things.

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My Thomson Reuters Sends Zotero a $10 Million EndNote post yesterday, attracted several comments and ping-backs.

The thoughts seem to drop in to a couple of themes.  Firstly there is the legal position – Have Thompson Reuters got a case, was it presented correctly, which bit of EndNote licensing does it depend upon, of what relevance is the GMU license to use EndNote, etc., etc.  My colleague Rob Styles, who has a far better understanding of these things, has published an excellent post over on our sister connecting  knowledge blog,  Xiphos, reviewing some of the legal issues.

At first glance it seems the case would be specious. Reverse engineering file formats in order to allow interoperability has been settled on several occasions.

In this case, however, GMU have a site license for EndNote. In Bower vs Baystate the courts upheld an anti reverse-engineering clause in the case where it had been knowingly and voluntarily entered into.

Rob also references James Grimmelmann’s post - Thomson Reuters: The Gang That Couldn’t Sue Straight - in which he questions the quality of the case that Thomson Reuters has presented.

The other theme that has emerged from the comments and other posts, is the corporate approach to things like this. As Bruce D’Arcus commented:

If there’s a problem here with corporate academia, it’s the fact that they mindlessly support companies like Thomson with expensive site licenses with ridiculous terms who are prone to litigate when things don’t go their way.

The flippant answer to Bruce’s point is that “they’ve always done it that way, so it’s hardly surprising”.  The corporate approach to the licensing, distribution, and protection of software intellectual property, has evolved over the last forty years or so.  It is only in the last few years that broad open source distribution of functionality, such as is at issue here, has even been possible.   It is therefore unsurprising that corporate monoliths, and especially their legal departments, appear to be way behind the curve of the Open Source and Open data movements.

As I said in my previous post - I predict that this will only one skirmish in a series of battles that will ensue as the information and knowledge publishing and distribution industry morphs into something new.  I stand by this.  We didn’t get from buying CDs in our local store to the current online, pay-as-you-go, take-it-wherever-you-go, iTunes world, without a few battles like this one.

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George Mason University is being sued by Thomson Reuters to prevent the distribution of the excellent Firefox plugin, Zotero.  As reported via the Courthouse News Service:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters’ EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base.

Subject of a Talking with Talis podcast last year with Trevor Owens, Zotero is an impressive free open source tool for capturing, organising and citing research resources, that has been building a successful community of users around it.

Thomson Reuters is complaining about the 1.5 preview release of  Zotero, announced on July 8th, which introduces several new features including:

Support for thousands of existing Endnote® export styles.

Following that link to Endnote export styles you end up on a page containing the following words:

EndNote output styles are provided solely for use by licensed owners of EndNote and with the EndNote product.

That seems to be the bit that is behind the legal action taken.  The question is can they, or should they, enforce such a restriction – not being a legal expert I’ll stop ruminating further in that direction.

The folks in the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, must be wondering what has hit them, but you can’t go rattling the current business model of a someone the size, history and market position of Thomson Reuters without expecting some form of backlash.

I can imagine the cries of outrage that will emanate from the Open Source and Open Data communities because of this.  They will no doubt be matched by indignation and litigious thoughts from the commercial sector as other publishers check to see how Zotero is helping to distribute their output but not necessarily in a way they would like.

It’s ironic then that somewhere else in the Thompson  Reuters organisation there is a site/service with the following ambition:

We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.

Calais (Powered by Thomson Reuters) is a semantic web technology based project which in simple terms provides an API to information about people, organisations, geographies, books, authors, events, facts about them, and links between them.  It is a free API service can be used openly, for commercial and non-commercial use, to enrich applications.  (For an insight in to Calais and how it fits with Reuters’ business, I can recommend the podcast Paul Miller recorded with Barak Pridor of ClearForest, the technology with which Calais has been built).

The action being taken against Zotero is symptomatic of the classic growing pains as technology and distribution mechanisms move on.  Just like the scribes complaining  about movable type in the 1400’s, or  the music industry complaining about the mp3 download culture that emerged some 600 years later.

I predict that this will only one skirmish in a series of battles that will ensue as the information and knowledge publishing and distribution industry morphs into something new.  Will actions like this prevent it happening? - of course not.  Will it slow it down? – possibly.   If I was part of the Zotero project would I be worried? – yes, I might be;  some of the early vanguards of the music download revolution were forced out of the race by such legal challenges.  Nevertheless, be it the opening of access to newly created knowledge or providing useful open access to traditionally controlled data, things are a changing.  We will look back on actions like the one against Zotero, viewing them as inevitable battles to try to preserve rapidly outdating business models – anybody read the Innovator’s Dilemma recently!

I hope  that the Zotero folks survive to reap the rewards of their pioneering efforts.

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As Conference Chairman, there is no better person than Adrian Dale to kick off this short series of Talking with Talis podcasts produced in association with Online Information Conference 2008.

The three day conference held at Olympia in London from 2nd – 4th December will have a wide range of speakers of broad interest to all information professionals from all sectors – libraries, academia, government, and commerce.

Adrian describes how this year’s programme builds on last year’s conference and how the conference committee were impressed with the large number of case studies that were submitted for practical implementations of the subjects talked about a year earlier.   With those case study presentations supporting a quality list of informative, inspirational, and entertaining keynote speakers, the 2008 conference looks like being a high spot.

 

 Adrian Dale Talks with Talis [00:45:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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After what seems an age of working from home and in the office over the summer, I’m out on the road again.  This post is coming from the departure lounge of the airport serving the wonderful city of Glasgow.  I’m on my way back from speaking at a one day conference – Introducing RFID – Are you on the right wavelength? – jointly organised by JISC and the Scottish Library & Information Council.

RFID that wonderful technology that makes self-service so much more an engaging and simple process for library users,  has been around for many years.  Yet for many libraries it is still new technology to be concerned about, not least because of the substantial financial and time investment required to deploy it.  It is telling of where we are with the general take up of this technology that almost without exception every speaker [including yours truly] felt the need to provide the audience with their description of what RFID is and the potential future benefits that may come from adopting it.

The best simple description of what RFID is today came from JISC’s Gaynor Backhouse – RFID is barcodes on steroids.  A way of attaching a machine readable identity to a physical item, that is easier to handle than a barcode and also can act as an overt security device.  Being able to read multiple items, without the need for contact or direct line of sight, has revolutionised the self-issue & return processes; finally realising the benefits for library staff and customers that were banded about many years ago when self-issue was first promoted.  Many of the speakers also emphasised the extra benefits for staff, undertaking mind-numbing labour intensive tasks such as stock taking/weeding/finding/checking, with the introduction of RFID reading wands and smart shelving.

There was much agreement as to these benefits, which are available to all libraries.  There were a few mutterings about interoperability issues between the offerings from different RFID system suppliers, but I get the impression that these concerns are rapidly fading.

Where there was far less clarity and agreement was the future of RFID beyond being just a better barcode.  An RFID chip is not only capable of storing far more data than just an identifier, but also it has the capability for that data to be changed and added to. 

As a techie at heart, the prospect of having the equivalent of a radio accessed memory stick stuck to every book cover, gets my creative juices running: the item’s loan history could follow it around; the book could arrive from the publisher with it’s catalogue record on board; it could attract the attention of an RFID enabled phone to tell it’s owner that is overdue and needs taking back to the library – to mention just a few of the more sensible ones.

There is a major blockage to the adoption of what could be described as these RFID 2.0 visions.  Nobody can agree on how to store the data on the RFID chips – as of today there is no standard for this.  In the standards less vacuum each supplier is doing their own incompatible thing.  That is not to say that there are no standards for RFID.  As independent RFID consultant Mick Fortune testified, there are more standards in this area than is wise to display on a single PowerPoint slide, but none of them address the issue of how to store this extended book/library data.

For a technology to become generally adopted, crossing that chasm between the early adopters to the take up by the early majority of users, there needs to be a standardised market in operation, reducing costs and risks.  Would the CD have been widely adopted if each record label, or equipment manufacturer, used their own proprietary encoding format?

Mick Fortune went on to describe some light on the horizon in the form of a proposed standard – ISO 28560-1  - a standard which codifies 25 data elements.  The adoption of this would be a major step forward.  Unfortunately, as always it seems in the world of standards, ISO 28560-1 is not the whole story.  There are also two competing, and apparently mutually exclusive, standards ISO 28560-2 & ISO 28560-3 which describe how these elements would be encoded on a chip –  that’s the trouble with standards, there are so many to choose from!.

If these standards are agreed, ratified and adopted by the industry I believe we will have removed a substantial barrier to the wider use of RFID for things beyond barcode replacement. The next problem will be to gain some agreement as to what those uses might be.   I may be short sighted but from my current point of view RFID 2.0 (I know I’m going to regret calling it that) looks like a great solution searching for a problem to solve.