I’m currently reading my way through the final draft of the OLE Project Final Report.  The one year Mellon Funded Open Library Environment (OLE) project which “convened a multi-national group of libraries to analyze library business processes and to define a next-generation library technology platform”

the project planners produced an OLE design framework that embeds libraries directly in the key processes of scholarship generation, knowledge management, teaching and learning by utilizing existing enterprise systems where appropriate and by delivering new services built on connections between the library’s business systems and other technology systems.

We at Talis, along with some 200 other organisations, participated in the process by feeding back our experiences in implementing live integrations between Library Management Systems and other institutional entities that the report authors recognise as being key to delivering a seamless workflow.  Our experience indicated that successful integration between systems is as much to do with local departmental motivations, understanding, and politics as it is to do with technology. This was discussed in more depth on the March Library 2.0 Gang Show with Tim McGeary from the OLE project and Talis’ Andy Latham  were guests.

The body of the report consists of many process model diagrams, describing the required interactions between library and other processes/components, which when brought together will enable the construction of library associated workflows for the next-generation library service that will utilise this next-generation library technology platform.

This first year project is in it’s own terms a success “The OLE Project met all of its objectives and was completed on time and within budget”.  One cannot deny the thought, effort, commitment and enthusiasm that has gone in to the production of this report.   Without rerunning the analysis they undertook, it would be difficult to criticise the model they have described.  The proof of the pudding of course will come in the next phase, when they move on from describing a new technology platform to start building it.

The planning phase of this project is complete. The next steps are to identify a group of build partners to provide investment funds and to develop and test the initial software. A build partner  can be an individual library, a consortium or a vendor.

The total partnership cost of the OLE Project over two years is projected to be $5.2 million, a figure that includes all programming effort as well as project management and quality assurance staffing. In addition to OLE Project costs, costs of participation would include some local staff, governance and travel funding. Project partners intend to contribute half of the OLE partnership costs and seek the other half from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Viewing the process diagrams in the report takes me back to 1990, in a snow covered hut in the grounds of the University of Birmingham.  I shared that hut for several weeks with Talis (then BLCMP) staff and a group of folks from a Dutch library system vendor (long since subsumed in to the OCLC global organisation) with the objective of designing the next-generation library technology platform.  Several years, and a few £ million in investment, led to the development a very successful library system from which the current Talis Library System, Alto, has since evolved.

There are many parallels between that 1990 development process and the road that OLE are about to embark upon, if their bids for continued funding are successful.  Not only that BLCMP was a library cooperative during that period, but also that we had the luxury of being able to step back from previous systems and start with a clean set of library process requirements. 

I wish the OLE project continued success.  Whatever achieved, I believe the exercise they are undertaking is massively valuable to the whole library domain. 

Will they be able to translate their clean [uncluttered by interaction issues with systems over which they have little influence, or uncoloured by local institutional inter-departmental politics, and ‘traditional practices] diagrams in to an installable, manageable, collection of components suitable to deliver format agnostic library services? – possibly.  Will they be able to do it in 2 years for a mere $5.2? – Experience tells me to be a little more sceptical on that last point.

Dr Michael Jubb, Director of the Research Information Network, is my guest for this podcast.

The RIN was established by the higher education funding councils, the research councils, and the national libraries in the UK to investigate how efficient and effective the information services provided for the UK research community are.

As part of their role, they publish many reports to inform and create debate to lead to real change.  Our conversation focuses on the recently published “Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world”, which explores the production and supply chain of bibliographic metadata for physical and electronic books, journals, and articles.  We discuss the need for the report, and therefore change in this area, its recommendations and possible ways forward.

Following on from OCLC’s recent Mashathon, Dave Pattern’s Mashed Library UK 2009, and the imminent publication of the Library Mashups book edited by Nicole Engard, The Library 2.0 Gang turn their attention to the Library Mashup.

Tallin Bingham from SIRSI/Dynix, Marshall Breeding of Library Technology Guides, LibLime’s Nicole Engard, and Google’s Frances Haugen, dip in to this topic for the July show.  It is soon clear that successful mashups are all about openly publishing data in a reliable easy form via simple APIs.  Library mashups are not just about bibliographic data.  Usage data, statistical data, and anonomized patron data are all valuable library sources for mashups.

As with many other technology trends, libraries are going to have to move quickly to keep up with and take advantage of mashups.

Check out the July Library 2.0 Gang Show.

Competition! -   Listening to the show should inspire you to enter the Library 2.0 Gang Mashup Idea competition.  Send in your idea for a library mashup.  It can be as simple or complex as you like.  The only restriction being that it must include library data or functionality somewhere within it.  The best three, as judged by Nicole Engard and myself, will each receive a copy of the Library Mashups book she has edited.  Closing date is August 31st, send your entries to librarygang@talis.com.

On the Library 2.0 Gang back in May we discussed Cloud Computing, an architecture in which you use your web browser to access your services on computers hosted by your system provider. 

Unlike traditional hosting, where you would expect to identify which system is running your application, cloud services appear as one big application servicing everyone’s needs spread across many computers and often data centres spread around the Internet.  The conversation last month was prompted by OCLC’s announcement they are developing such a service for delivering library services such as circulation, acquisitions, and license management.  The introduction of library services from the cloud, in a market where the vast majority of libraries host their own systems, could be potentially game changing and we speculated on what the reaction of the current suppliers would be.

In an attempt to answer some of that speculation I brought together a gang for the June show consisting of representatives of some of those suppliers – Carl Grant from Ex Libris, Nicole Engard from LibLime who support the Open Source system Koha, and Rob Styles from Talis.  We were joined by a new guest to the show Boris Zetterlund from Scandinavian and now UK supplier Axiell.

Technical issues, potential costs, applicability for smaller libraries, and openness of data & APIs all got an airing in this interesting conversation – have a listen.

As I reported back in September last year Thompson Reuters sued George Mason University  to prevent the distribution of the excellent Firefox plugin, Zotero.

Well good news, as Sean Takats reports on his Quintessence of Ham blog, the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit.

As co-director of the Zotero project along with Dan Cohen, I look forward to witnessing the Zotero team now devote its full attention to crafting the pathbreaking new features that are immediately on the development horizon: customized research recommendations, innovative annotation tools, and pioneering collaborative functionality.

Great new for the team, onwards and upwards.

Jennifer Younger, Chair of the OCLC Review Board of Shared Data Creation & Stewardship announced in a presentation on May 18th [video stream and presentation slides here] that they are to “Formally withdraw the proposed policy”

From her presentation:

• We affirm that a policy is needed, but not this policy
• Formally withdraw the proposed policy
• Until a new policy is in place, reaffirm the existence and applicability of the Nov. 16, 1987 “Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records”

She goes on to explain how they are to move on to “Discuss the role and value of WorldCat in the information ecosystem, and ways in which it can be leveraged” – “Devise a process for drafting and maintaining a new policy” [quotes from slides]

In her speech [from 16 minutes in] she indicated that the process for drawing up a new policy “must involve the governance structure of OCLC – the proposed policy is fundamental to the functioning of OCLC”

“The development of this policy without sufficient consultation has led some to the conclusion that members are not successfully influencing the directions of the organisation; which in the eyes of some weakens OCLC.  It’s certainly not in our best interest”

An announcement, and honest admission of getting it very wrong, that I suspect nobody at OCLC expected to be making only a few short months ago.  It is now up to their membership to influence and help the organisation get these fundamental principles right.

I seem to be spending lots of time on trains recently.  This time I’m on my way back from the OpenLibraries Open Source Breaking the Barriers 2009 conference held at RIBA in London.

Jointly organised by Ken Chad Consulting and PTFS Europe, this was an interesting day, although I think it would have been better titled the Open Source in Libraries Conference, but that’s probably just me.

The UK library world hasn’t really stepped on the Open Source ILS/LMS band-wagon yet.  At most, interest so far has been of the ‘watching developments across the Atlantic’ type.  So for many, today was the first chance to think about it in a conference setting.  The day was kicked off by a thought provoking Charles Leadbeater who set open source in context with other trends in the web and social spaces.  Conference organiser Ken Chad was about to launch in to his presentation when he was rudely interrupted by a fire alarm.  Six flights of stairs later, we all convened in the street for 15 minutes whilst the cause of the false alarm was tracked down by the fire brigade.  Luckily this unscheduled networking opportunity took place in the sunshine – an hour later and we would have all been drenched.

What felt like far more than six stair flights were then scaled, with Ken’s thoughts on the value that an Open Source approach can provide to our sector, as a reward.

Bob Molyneux of Equinox and Mike Taylor of Index Data gave some different views from companies successfully delivering, and building a business out of, Open Source software.  Bob detailed how much their Evergreen system had developed since its initial deployment for Georgia PINES.  Mike reminded us that many proprietary systems, Talis’ included, use Index Data Open Source components.

They were followed by BibLibre’s Paul Poulain who took us through SOPAC (the subject of a Talking with Talis Podcast with it’s developer and Library 2.0 Gang member, John Blyberg) and how he was linking it with Koha.

Representative of the co-organisers, Nick Dimant then took us through how PTFS Europe, an established company in other associated areas, could support libraries whishing to contemplate either an Evergreen or Koha installation.  He painted a stark picture of what it was like in a proprietary system vendor, short on funds to invest in their products, unable to innovate, cutting back on support where sleeping cats answered the phones.  Although entertaining, and possibly based on experience in some organisations, it was not a picture I recognise from within Talis. 

Mark  Hughes and Paul Johnson of Swansea University later described the why’s when’s and how’s of the choice and implementation (still in progress) of a VuFind based OPAC for the three university consortium in South Wales – SWWHEP.  They were followed by Strathclyde University lecturer, Alan Poulter who described how he used multiple copies of Koha to give students, on his MSc Digital Libraries module, experience of a using a real library system – from creating borrowers  and library rules to cataloguing in Marc.

The last section of the day, described by Ken as the view from the proprietary systems vendors, consisted of Ex Libris’  Director of Marketing, Tamar Sadeh, and myself.

Tamar talked through the Ex Libris open-platform program, (the subject of another Talking with Talis podcast) explaining how openly sharing the documentation of their APIs with their customers, stimulates innovation that can then be shared in that community.  The code being hosted by Ex Libris under the licence of choice from the developer.   Of course most of us in the audience, not being Ex Libris customers with logins to the Ex Libris site, only have her presented screen shots to support her descriptions.  We will have to wait for Ex Libris to open up this open site before we can browse the innovations she was extolling.

It was left to me to bring the presentations to a close with 20 minutes worth on Open Source projects, Jangle and Juice.  My slides are on SlideShare, where you can see the overview I gave of why Jangle in providing a consistent Web Standards based way of connecting to Open Source and Proprietary Library Systems, will enable and stimulate innovation.  I took advantage of one of the better conference wifi connections to demonstrate the power of Juice Project extensions adding to the user experience of Talis Prism, VuFind and discovery interfaces.

Overall a very good, well attended, with something for everyone, day.

The excellent presentations and lightening talks from the Code4lib 2009 Conference held in Providence, Rhode Island in February were videoed for posterity.

With sponsorship help from Talis, these have now been edited and published on the Code4lib 2009 site.

Each presentation is linked from the relevant slot in the conference schedule.

Those that followed the conference will be aware that there were 3 Talis presentations which I recommend for viewing – Ian Davis, Ross Singer and myself.

I’m currently hurtling through the English countryside on a Wifi enabled train having spent the day at E-books and E-content 2009 held at University College London.  An interesting and stimulating day  with a well matched but varied set of speakers, including yours truly (presentation on SlideShare).  The eighty strong audience were also a varied selection from academic libraries, academia in general, publishers and the information media.

The move towards a web of data, enabled by the emergence of semantic web technologies and practices, was one of my themes. Another was a plea for content publishers and providers to deliver their content to the user where he/she is.  Not expecting them to be driven to their site with a totally different interface.  This is a difficult one for the eContent industry, at a time when the publishers are in the middle of a “my platform is better than yours” battle.  Nevertheless, a student wants the content their course has recommended, not caring who published it or which aggregator their library licensed it from.

In laying the ground, I initially discussed the technology adoption curve and how technologies don’t become mainstream overnight.  Any new technology, or new way of doing things, follows a standard pattern with a small number of innovators taking the initial often enthusiastic risk.  The early adopters then build on the innovators’ success and and join in, still very early with some risk. When the new way has been proven, adoption has increased and both costs and risk have fallen, the early and late majorities take it to mass acceptance and adoption.  This only leaves the laggards, who will only come on board if forced by circumstance.

As an adjunct to the adoption curve, I spoke about a chasm which technologies have to cross, between the early adopters and the early majority before they take off.  There are many promising technologies that failed to cross that chasm.  For example, technology watchers at the time predicted that the mini-disc would replace the cassette tape, but as we know the CD took that prize.

Today’s conference was mostly focussed on the eBook and it’s impact on libraries and publishers.  This is on the assumption that it will be the way of delivering book sized pieces of content in the approaching digital world.  In answer to a challenging question for the end of day panel, I concluded that this is by no means certain.  I believe direct access to articles will eventually see the end of the traditional journal issue format. In a similar way I believe there is a good chance that chunks of content, that are today of book size, may well be assembled and delivered in a digital object as yet to be identified.

So will the eBook jump the adoption chasm?  If I was a betting man I would only back it on an each way basis.  I believe that anyone betting their whole business model on it being a certain winner, may just be taking too much of a risk.

Photo from mstorz published on Flickr

It will have been difficult to miss OCLC’s recent Cloud Computing announcement.  If you have, the headline is that they say they are building an architecture capable of handling all the transactions of all libraries, meaning that they can add circulation, acquisitions, license management and several other aspects of library management to their WorldCat shared discovery capability.

As you can imagine, all this built upon racks of computers hosted at OCLC’s data centre combining their power to deliver a service to many users at the same time.  A well proven technology as used by Google, Sun, Amazon, Salesforce.com, and even here at Talis where the Talis Platform underpins our Engage, Aspire, and Prism products. The rest of the computing world describes this as Software as a Service (SaaS) or Cloud Computing.

For some reason OCLC are determined to come up with their own term – Web-Scale.  OCLC’s Andrew Pace in his recently published Talking with Talis podcast [highly recommended if you want an insight in to this initiative] tries to explain why the library world needs such a term.  The inaugural post on the OCLC Engineering blog, by Mike Teets also goes in to much depth as to what Web-Scale is.

Having read and listen to all this I must admit I’m still unconvinced.  It still sounds like engineering has be brought in, to support the marketing folks’ desire to be different, with technical description.  There are enough confusing terms hijacked by marketeers in the computing and Internet worlds. So I’m sure OCLC will forgive me if I continue to describe their approach as a cloud based software as a service – Cloud Computing.