LibraryThing have followed the opening up of their Common Knowledge API with the A million free covers from LibraryThing announcement:

A few days ago, just before hitting thirty million books, we hit one million user-uploaded covers. So, we’ve decided to give them away—to libraries, to bookstores, to everyone.

Get yourself a LibraryThing Developer Key (any LibraryThing member can get one), and you can retrieve up to 1,000 covers per day.  As they encourage local cashing of images, even this is not really a limit.

Tim Spalding openly admits that this service competes with Amazon web service, but LibraryThing’s Terms of Service are far more open it also competes with other commercial services (which are on average better) but without their costs.

The folks at LibraryThing have been promoting the open use of data for a long time, it is great to see them continuing to practice what they preach – lets hope their bandwidth can support this, as I can see it becoming very popular.

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Listening to the conversation on the August show from The Library 2.0 Gang, the seems to be a consensus that it has.  I believe that  the folks behind the open source movements can credit themselves not only with providing alternatives and a challenge to the [traditional] commercial vendors, but also with changing the way those vendors now interact with their customers. 

SirsiDynix CTO, Talin Bingham, said that they are now behaving in a more open way with their customers, by providing APIs and helping libraries configure their systems.  Carl Grant, newly moved from [Open Source] CARE Affilates to become president of Ex Libris North America, commented - we are heading towards the best of all possible worlds - with choice of open or commercial systems that will openly connect.

Whilst neither Talin or Carl took up the suggestion that, because they are involving their customers so closely, it might be worth considering open sourcing their software; it was clear that both of their organisations see a mix of open source and commercially licensed software on customer sites being the way forward.

Adding a more global theme, one of the guests on the show was L J Haravu Chief Domain Specialist, Verus Solutions Pvt., Ltd., Hyderabad India, the software company behind NewGenLib the Open Source library system successfully spreading across India, Arabic speaking countries and as far afield as Cambodia.  The NewGenLib experience is of a climate where funds, or even the acknowledgement of the need, for investment in library systems is lacking, makes their success in rolling out over 120 installations impressive.

All on the show, vendors and open source advocates alike, are enthusiastic about the library systems market and the part open source is playing in it.

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The Francisco Partners investment fund has sold its holdings in Ex Libris to New York based Leeds Equity Partners for an estimated $170M, according to HAARETZ.com.

In the upbeat Ex Libris press release  Matti Shem Tov, Ex Libris Group president and CEO is quoted as saying “the Ex Libris corporate structure will remain unaltered, this change in ownership will provide Ex Libris with additional resources for accelerating our current and future product strategies and our plans for international expansion.”

It looks like Francisco Partners made a reasonable return on their couple of years ownership of Ex Libris, Leeds Equity Partners seems to think it has bought in to a good investment, and Ex Libris has got access to extra resources – so everyone is happy…..

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Although I had my dreaded PDA with me on my recent couple of weeks away, I did resist the temptation to do much other than delete spam whilst sat on the beach in Cornwall.   There were a few things worth comment which passed through between spam so here is a catch up in no particular order:

 Bibliocommons goes live in Oakville
The public library of Oakville, ON, near Toronto, is the first to go live with a Bibliocommons based system.  Bibliocommons is an interesting mix between centrally hosted social features and the local [Horizon I believe] library system. 

This OPAC looks good, and presses all the 2.0 buttons – tags, comments, summaries, personal collections, save to lists, etc.  It will be interesting to see how the social features work as other libraries join Bibliocommons – but a great start.

Amazon buys AbeBooks
The LibraryThing blog had the scoop on this last week.   Not unsurprising really as AbeBooks had minority shareholding in LibraryThing.  Tim Spalding assures the LibraryThing membership that there will be little effect for them, but I bet he is looking enviously at the pile hardware that Amazon have whirring away in their data centres.  

The move has also spurred the LibraryThing developers in to action to release some services to demonstrate LibraryThing’s commitment to open data and support for libraries and other book lovers.  - See below.

Carl Grant moves to Ex Libris as LibLime acquire CARE Affiliates
Listeners to the Library 2.0 Gang will know Carl Grant as someone with great experience in the world of Library Systems.  Carl his moving from the open source company CARE Affiliates to take the position of president of Ex Libris, North America.  

That other well known open source company LibLime announced at the same time they were to acquire  selected assets of CARE Affiliates.  

This move of a sector heavy-weight from open source back in to the commercial vendor community, no doubt will be seized upon by some to predict the bursting of the open source bubble – things are never that simple.

LibraryThing opens up Common Knowledge
LibraryThing have announced the release of an open API for Common Knowledge their groundbreaking "fielded wiki" for interesting book information (see original blog post). It includes fields like series, important characters, important places, author dates, author burial places, agents, edits, etc.

Access, limited to 1,000 hits per day, is free and made available under the highly permissive Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

As Tim hints, this is only first such announcement from LibraryThing – watch out for other useful data being opened up.

III web site gets a social refresh
The latest incarnation of the Innovative Interfaces web site features a 2.0 looking tag cloud and links to blogs by III staff and others, under the heading of ‘What’s Brewing’  - good to see.

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In October 2005 VTLS inc announced their success in being chosen as preferred provider, with their Virtua product, for the library management system for the University of Oxford and its member libraries.

It has now been announced University of Oxford and VTLS Inc. agree to end implementation of Virtua at Oxford.  

Reading the press release it is clear that despite VTLS’s technical sophistication, its support for key library standards such as Unicode and FRBR, and its commitment to work with Oxford, trying to satisfy the needs of over 100 libraries was too big a nut to crack.

Dr Sarah Thomas Director of the Bodleian Library and Oxford University Library Services (OULS) is quoted as saying:

‘Oxford is a complex organisation, and it needs to simplify and standardise its operations to take full advantage of system functionality and efficiency. Until we resolve some of the issues around the diverse practices prevalent in our libraries, we are hampered in implementing an advanced library management system such as Virtua.’

Reading between those lines, it seems that Dr Thomas has a cat-herding job to resolve, before moving back in to library management system implementation mode again.

Perhaps it is not too gloomy a picture at Oxford though.  A high profile failure such as this may help concentrate the minds of some of those responsible for maintaining those diverse practices.  Also a more standardised and simplified organisation may well be able to take advantage of techniques and technologies that have emerged since 2005 – a loosely coupled organisation of over 100 libraries should be taking a close look at the semantic relationships between their data for instance.

Picture of clouds looming over the Bodleian Library by Dr. Jaus on Flickr.

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In this Talking with Talis podcast I am in conversation with Jonathan Gorman from the University of Illinois.

Jon can often be found on the code4lib IRC channel discussing many aspects of innovation with the community of library software developers and enthusiasts.

In our conversation we discuss his career and some of the tasks and projects he is involved with. Mentioned in our discussion is Jon’s article for Code4lib Journal about using Authority data in VuFind.

 

 Johnathan Gorman Talks with Talis [00:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The next UK general election is probably only a couple of years away and there is a serious possibility that we could see a change of governing party. Against this background Ed Vaizey, Conservative MP for Wantage & Didcot and Shadow Minister for Culture is beginning to shape his thoughts and future policy with respect to libraries.

This podcast conversation, recorded in Ed Vaizey’s office in the Houses of Parliament, explores Ed’s thinking as to the way Government should influence library services provided by local authorities; is the MLA as an organisation the appropriate way to promote libraries at a national level; and even is the Department of Culture the right place for libraries to be represented.

With a guest appearance of Big Ben, chiming the hour, this is an interesting insight into the thoughts of a senior opposition politician on the future of libraries.

This conversation was recorded on Wednesday 10th July and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

 

 Ed Vaizey Talks with Talis [00:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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In this month’s Library 2.0 Gang show on the recent ALA conference in Anaheim, Char Booth fed back that one of the themes from the conference that she had picked up on was privacy.

Specifically around the area of patron (or borrowers as we call them in the old country) data, both personal and activity data from within a library system.  There seems to be three shades of strongly held opinion.

The do-what-everyonelse-does faction promote the fact that people are happy for Amazon, Flickr, Facebook, and the rest to store and use their data to deliver a better service for them - so why should libraries be any different.

The there-is-data-and-there-is-data group point out that they are not talking about really personal data (such as birth date, phone number, social security number), but general information (along the lines of ‘an unknown 2nd year engineering student has loaned these books).  Anonymous but very useful data that could add great value to the services offered by a library.

The expunge-any-and-all-data-once-it-is-not-absolutely-necessary grouping seem to think it is a massive violation of privacy to even keep a record of previous loans so that you could tell someone what the title of that book they borrowed last summer was.

In that final grouping I believe there are some who are clutching at the privacy issue as a way to slow or even stall the move towards social networking and other 2.0-ish influences that are changing the balance of interaction between librarians and their patrons.

It would be disingenuous to colour all those at the keep it private end of the debate with this motivation, but I do feel that there are some out there that think this way.  How often in a conference session about the wonders of social networking, or one that points out the fact that OPAC results would be more relevant if you could use a student’s course information in the ranking algorithm, do you hear the ‘but you are exposing private data so it will never work‘ comment?

Let’s face it, in the broad grouping of opinions we find in the librarian community, there are a few who are not comfortable with things 2.0, and would prefer things to stay as they are.  It is to these that others at the other end of the spectrum of opinion may be tempted to attach the label luddite, especially in these times when it is fashionable to espouse the virtues of using people data to add value.

There is much to be worked out as to the how, how much, by whom, for whom, with what permission, under what control, of the data held about the users of our systems, but I believe that some opening up is already starting to happen.  Those using the privacy issue as a reason to hold back innovation in this area will eventually find themselves bypassed.

Having said all that, I don’t expect my local library to be sharing any of my personal information without my permission anytime soon.  I would hope that sometime soon they will be using my borrowing patterns to help others with their choices; my clicks to help improve navigation through their software; my demographic profile to provide a better service to me; and possibly even providing OpenID verification from a service I trust.

Picture by wasabicube on Flickr

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee first talked about the Semantic Web in the seminal Scientific American article back in 2001.  The first mention of it I can find on Panlibus was back in 2004, and anyone who has spent a few minutes talking about data with us at Talis will know we have been passionate about Semantic Web technologies ever since.  My colleague Paul Miller has interviewed Sir Tim on Talking with Talis. Our Platform is built using Semantic Web techniques and technologies.  

In the techno-geek community there is a significant division between those that get the Semantic Web, and can’t wait until it is a reality, and those that don’t get it and think it is science fiction that will never become usefully real.

The discussions between these groups often involve things such as RDF, Open Linked Data - all far too techie for a conversation with  the general public - or you would think so.

Now along comes Sir Tim on BBC Radio 4’s morning current affairs program Today.  Today pulls in a regular national audience of millions, the vast majority of whom you could in no way describe as techie. He delivered a classic description of the Semantic Web, in language which made it easy to follow - even the interviewer appeared to understand! - and the dreaded RDF was mentioned.

This eight minute conversation, which includes an introduction from the BBC’s science correspondent Tom Feilden, should become introductory listening for anyone wanting to find out more about the Semantic Web.   Because of the potential benefits to data rich environments such as libraries, it should be compulsory listening for librarians, who can then go on and listen to library people who get it such as Allan Cho and Ed Summers.  For those that want to dig even further, I can do no better than recommend Nodalities Magazine, and our sister blog Nodalities.

Back to Sir Tim’s interview.  Towards the end he is asked about what is happening with the Semantic Web in the UK.  He has a reputation for not wanting to advertise particular companies, but I must admit I was shouting out what about Garlik, what about True Knowledge, and what about Talis! - there I’ve done it for him.

Picture from hyoga on Flickr.

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The Library 2.0 Gang, July - ALA Conference show has been published and is available for a listen.

Outgoing ALA president Loriene Roy was the guest.  Gang regulars for this show Char Booth (soon to move to a new position at The University of California, Berkeley - well done Char), Carl Grant from Care Affiliates, Marshall [Library Technology Guides] Breeding, and Ex Libris CSO, Oren Beit-Arie.

Different perspectives on the success and future of the conference came to the surface, leading to a lively debate.  Predictably the split was along the traditional for-profit (vendor) - not-for-profit (library) fault-line.  With vendors having to invest serious money to appear on the exhibition floor, for which the return is unclear, and librarians having to justify their expenditure in attending, there is a little tention in the financial balance on putting on an ALA.

The conference, which incidentally is planned ten years ahead and it’s program is shaped eighteen months ahead, attracted 22,000 to Anaheim California.  Held in hotels up the road from Disneyland (apparently from where librarian Twittering was detected) it featured some 300 educational  programs, 2000  meetings and events - how do you decide what to attend!
Other topics covered on the show included privacy - are we being over protective and holding back innovation -  and would free doughnuts help sales.

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