Rachel Bruce of JISC and Anne Bell of SCONUL join me in the latest Talking with Talis podcast to discuss the recently published JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study - An Evaluation and horizon scan of the current library management systems and related systems landscape for UK higher education.

We discuss the report, the reasons for commissioning it, how it will inform the on going debate about the future of academic libraries, and how libraries could use it.

 

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During the conversation we reference the following resources:

• JISC
• SCONUL
• JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study [pdf]
• JISC Information Environment
• Libraries of the Future

This conversation was recorded on Friday 9th May  and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

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…. or in the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto - Markets are conversations.

The May 2008 Library 2.0 Gang ticks a couple of boxes on the list of things that show that the best way to move forward is to talk and form a consensus.

Firstly the subject of the conversation - The Digital Library Federation (DLF) working group that are recommending a generic API for all Library Systems to support, and the ‘Berkeley Accord’ that most vendors have signed in support of this.

Secondly, the fact that senior people from at least three of the major vendors are comfortable joining the Library 2.0 Gang for an open recorded conversation, about how they might support the API recommendations in their product sets.

As facilitating host and chair for the conversation, it was very refreshing to hear how open Talin Bingham from SirsiDynix, Oren Beit-Arie from Ex Libris, and Talis’ Dan Mullineux were about their plans and support for the DLF initiative.   One point of discussion in the show was the position of Innovative Interfaces, who were the only vendor who explicitly abstained from supporting the Berkeley Accord.  All others that expressed a position supported it.   Although unable to take part in the conversation, it is clear from the blog post by Betsy Graham, Vice President of Product Management, that their position is not as negative as some have painted it.

If from this you think that the show is a vendor love-in, you would be wrong.  The Gang for this show also included Andrew Nagy, lead developer and passionate promoter of VuFind the Open Source Library OPAC, and the well known watcher of, and commentator on, the Library Systems world, Marshall Breeding.  Appropriately the show guest was John Mark Ockerbloom who is chair for the DLF’s working group.

During the show it was obvious that all were enthusiastic about the initiative, whilst in agreement that these first baby-steps to opening up access to library systems should be implemented  widely as soon as possible.

This third show consolidates the position of the Gang as being the monthly listen for those that are interested in libraries and the technologies that influence them.   As Gang host it is my goal to foster open conversations between vendors, their customers, and opinion formers in the library market.  I know, as an Evangelist employed by Talis, that some initially viewed this with some skepticism.  All three show so far, I believe demonstrate that open conversations between open minded players in our world both move things forward and an interesting and informative listen.

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UK Library System Supplier DS, announced this week that "With immediate effect DS becomes part of the Axiell Library Group family of companies."

Axiell the Nordic Library Systems Group with, up until now, interests constrained to Sweden, Denmark and Finland, announced cooperation with DS  back in February.   This cooperation on Library 2.0 content management and portal platforms has so far resulted in their Arena product that got an outing at the LiS 2008 show last week.

I’m sure both sets of customers will welcome the assurance from Nigel Pegg, Managing Director of DS, that "Customers in both regions will see significant benefits".  One can only hope on their behalf that the merger of two organisations with separate product sets is also a little less uncomfortable than it has been for some previous mergers in the sector.

In a mature, everyone has got one, market where vendors are competing on functional minutia, and new coats of paint for public interfaces, for applications built on a core architecture that has not changed for years, you can either try to innovate or consolidate your way out of a difficult situation.  Time will tell which this current merger is leading towards.

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Libraries are the Future, or that is the implication of the the new JISC initiative - Libraries of the Future. The initiative was trumpeted at the JISC 2008 Conference in Birmingham last week, which I commented about previously.  There was some good stuff that came out of the conference, not least this.  Checking out the Libraries of the Future site you get this overview of where they are coming from.

In an information world in which Google apparently offers us everything, what place is there for the traditional, and even the digital, library? In a library environment which is increasingly moving to the delivery of online rather than print resources, what of the academic library’s traditional place at the heart of campus life?

What about the impact of repositories and open access on the delivery of library resources? And the need to digitise and make more widely accessible key scholarly resources? And what of the calls for libraries to play a central role in the promotion of ‘information literacy’?

Through ‘Libraries of the Future’, JISC is hoping to explore these and many other questions, to open up - with partner organisations and librarians themselves - a debate about the future of the academic and research library.

To coincide with the launch, yesterday’s Guardian contains an eight page supplement Libraries unleashed, produced in association with JISC.  The print version has lots of nice pictures in addition to all the text in the online version.

Lots of good reading in here, not just about technology, the articles on buildings and spaces are interesting as well.  One particular paragraph caught my eye, quoting Dr Ian Rowlands from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (Ciber), in Wendy Wallace’s article Information Alert.

"There is a clear message that young people have not been taught to construct a proper search and evaluate the results. Libraries are spending a fortune on premium content, but fundamental skills are lacking."

Surely we should be investing in the development of the discovery and delivery tools for this premium content, so that you don’t need training to use it.  If you need to train users to use your system, you have probably failed the usability test.

The Libraries are the future theme is something I picked up on whilst at the JISC 2008 conference.  I get the feeling that the drift away from libraries providing and guiding access to information that serves the scholar and the researcher - Learning Management Systems/eLearning, archives, repositories etc., being set up and run away from the library - may well start to be reversed as folks realise the need for information management and librarian skills in these areas.

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It’s a little disconcerting when your own words from months ago are quoted back at you from a distance.  That’s the trouble with the blogosphere, it is so easy for connections to what you have said to be linked in to the conversation in ways you never expected.  Trouble? - No it is one of its major benefits - disconcerting or not!

Recently Mark Dahl quoted something I said a while back.  I was discussing how we must stop developing destination applications and start delivering the information and functionality that users want, to where they are working - for instance inside the Learning Management System/eLearning System/VLE (or whatever you call them down your way) - apparently I boasted that the new Reading List (Course Reserves) application Talis are working on "doesn’t even have a user interface".  The reason I gave, at the time, was that students don’t need yet another destination to go to to find the information they need - so why build one. 

Providing the functionality to link resources to courses in a way that adds value well beyond the simple attempts to be found in ILS/LMS systems, and their course management system counterparts, is an obvious development.  What is less obvious, at first, is that you don’t need to build a user interface for it - the student is already in a library system, or a learning management system, or a portal, or FaceBook, or whatever - why can we not deliver the functionality directly in to that environment?  Well today the answer to that question is that those applications are not very good at embedding Web Services directly in to their interfaces.

This is why Talis development team member Julian Higman (featured in the February issue of the Library Platform News) was very quick to comment on Mark’s post "I’m working on the reading list application at Talis that you mention, and it certainly does have a user interface!"  - Having calmed Julian down (I jest), we both agreed that the fact it was necessary to build a user interface for this product is symptomatic of the inability of most applications, in the University domain, to consume web services and usefully integrate their functionality in to a user’s work flow.

As I commented previously, the online university today is a collection of many silos that the user [student, professor, researcher] is expected to know how to navigate, let alone be able to identify the connections between data in those silos.  I expect that this comes as a bit of a shock to the average new student. -  I thought I had come to this university to learn about my chosen subject, not to spend a significant amount of time and effort becoming an expert in the use of a multiplicity of different applications and services that are supposedly here to help me.

Peter Brantley was on the money for Mark in his post, about building a Flickr-like system for academia, when he said "However, what will make the application ultimately successful is the availability of open services that permit re-use: mashups that encourage integration with other services and content."

I heartily agree, but only as an interim step.  Most of today’s systems are not integrated in any way, so mashing their outputs, exposed via APIs, together in a Web 2.0 way will be a major step forward.  Doing this still misses the underlying links that are usually only apparent as connections in the eye of the user, if they happen to appear on the screen together.  When we can follow those links between data across silos we will remove the false barriers, imposed by technology thus far, and expose our users to the world of linked data.  

Below is a diagram I am working on to hopefully help people visualise what I mean.  Utilising Web 2.0 technologies we bring together [mashup] the output from various application silos in to one interface.  A great improvement over Web 1.0 where each application would present its data on it’s own independent, and different, screen.  Utilising Web 3.0 [Semantic Web] technologies, links between data in separate silos can be identified and presented as connections and relationships in a single Web of Data - much closer to a representation of the real world.

I would be interested in feedback on this diagram.  Does it help, or does it make things more confusing?

Megaphone picture published by Paul Keleher in Flickr.

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This report - JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study - An Evaluation and horizon scan of the current library management systems and related systems landscape for UK higher education [pdf] - was presented at this week’s JISC 2008 Conference in Birmingham.

Not being able to clone myself I missed the presentation session, but this extensive report makes very interesting reading in it’s own right.  It’s observations and recommendations, although targeted at the UK academic library sector, are applicable and of great relevance to the global academic and public library sectors.

I encourage a full read of the document, but check the page count before pressing print - you could save a few trees by making prints of the 157 page document double-sided or even in booklet form.

The compilers of the report - Sero Consulting Ltd with Glenaffric Ltd and Ken Chad Consulting Ltd - have invested a great deal of time taking input exactly 100 UK HE libraries, all the major LMS vendors and the Reference Group drawn from the UK and the international community.  Because of this you will find many interesting quotes and comments in the report from librarians concerned with managing library systems, and senior people within the vendor community, including Ex Libris, SirsiDynix, Innovative, and Talis.

The perspective of the UK Academic Library Library Management Systems (LMS in the UK, ILS or even ILMS, dependant on your country) in the report:

LMS Market - The UK market is mature, dominated by four vendors with relatively little product differentiation. Movement in product replacement is slow and customer loyalty to their LMS vendor is high. Many Libraries remain unconvinced about Electronic Resource Management systems and the take-up of new developments such as vertical search is relatively low.

… could, with minor tweaks to the number of dominating vendors, be applicable to almost any country.

The Executive Summary recommendations:

The study recommends libraries invest in systems with caution but not complacency, emphasizing that, whilst the library function has continuing and potentially growing value, the role of ‘conventional’ library may appear increasingly unclear. 

• Libraries reviewing LMS contracts should seek increased value, looking at ways to improve services by implementing features around the core LMS.
• The focus on breaking down barriers to resources is endorsed, involving single sign on, unifying workflows and liberating metadata for re-use.
• SOA-based interoperability across institutional systems is emphasised as the foundation for future services and possibly the de-coupling of LMS components

There is consensus that the time is right for intensified dialogue about the nature and function of the modern HE library, its systems and processes. It is especially timely to explore consortia and other partnership arrangements to increase critical mass and network effect, whilst potentially reducing system and service costs.

Responding to these business needs, JISC & SCONUL are encouraged to work jointly with the community to develop and enhance understanding of Library 2.0 and the potential role of the international e-Framework. There is also a vital role in developing strategic engagement with the LMS vendors, with a focus on business process and user workflow review.

… are more than relevant to anyone, and especially those considering change.

Having read much of the report, my personal opinions only differ significantly with the authors in the area of the influence of Open Source software and systems.  Seeing the growth of OS influence in the United States, especially in the academic sector, I believe that the authors and those that they interviewed will be surprised by it’s effect over the next few years.

Less of my opinions though, I recommend a read of this significant report for the UK HE library sector that will be of significance and interest to a wider audience.

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I spent yesterday in Birmingham’s excellent ICC convention centre at the JISC Conference 2008.

As with all multi-track conferences, apart from the keynote sessions, it is always difficult to get an overall view of the mood, and themes of concern, for the large group of people that congregate at such an event.

Looking back over the day, the word that came to the surface, appearing in most presentations and conversations accompanying refreshments, was silos.  

Describing the way academic libraries have to deliver services to their users, the phrase "providing seamless access to the silos of data" showed up a few times.  In the same way the silos of information held in the VLEs, VREs, Archives, Repositories, and the Library, need to be made easily available to the students/academic staff/researchers that use them.

Academia has a problem, well at least in it’s online presence.   The many excellent efforts to draw together sets of data and resources utilising pre-Web 2.0 technologies have inevitably resulted in the creation of many silos of data that users have to interact with on a silo-by-silo basis. 

Take for instance the average library web site with its many and varied sources of data on offer for you to search - and often that is without taking in to consideration repositories, archives, and the like held outside of the library’s direct influence.  Why on earth should a consumer of university information and learning services have to know which virtual box data is hidden in, before they are able to search for it?  OK perhaps I’m being a little disingenuous with that last remark, as I know the answers to my own question.  Firstly, until very recently, systems were never designed on the assumption that they would would sit alongside other [peer] systems and users would want or need to search them in parallel with those peer systems.  Secondly, the data, and metadata, standards used for holding information in these systems often differ greatly from each other.

There have been many projects over the years, producing a federated search across either disparate data sets inside an institution, or similar data sets across disparate institutions - these have had varying degrees of success , but none really solving the problem.  Another approach has been to just solve the single-sign-on problem so that at least users can get to the individual resources without having to negotiate various login hurdles, so at least it feels like the university owns all the resources.

In a couple of yesterday’s sessions Web 2.0 was presented as the solution to these problems.  [Subject to solving the identity and single-sign-on access problems which are generic in any integration project] Mashup access to our resources so that all the data-sets can appear as one on a single [portal] interface.  Yes, that will be better from the end user point of view - single access point, single user interface, single style, integration with other social tools like blogs, wikis, Facebook, etc. - Web 2.0 can offer much to make the user’s life and interaction simpler and more pleasurable.

But, is Web 2.0 solving the basic problem?  I contend that it is not.  No matter how you provide access to silos of data, delineated by technical, data standard, financial, and political practices - they are still silos.   The real value of providing access to more than one set of data is the links and associations between the individual elements of that data.  

Two  scenarios….

It is useful to know, by searching a course management system, that Prof Joe Bloggs takes lectures on a particular course.  It is useful to know, by searching an electronic resource management system, that Prof Joe Bloggs has published several papers on the subject.  It is useful to know, by searching the library catalogue,  that Prof Joe Bloggs has written a book on the subject which is in the library.  It is useful to know, by searching Technorati, that Prof Joe Blogs has blogged about the subject.

Whereas….

It would be really valuable that, the University System [knowing what course you were on] would provide a link to your lecturers, one of those being Prof Joe Bloggs.  By following links provided by the system you would be able to see the blog posts he had made on the subject of your course; the books in the library that he has authored on the subject; the lectures he has/is giving on your and possibly other courses; the papers he had published on the subject; the co-authors of those papers; the courses those co-authors are associated with; and on across the graph of relationships between people and things inside and outside of the university.

The former is what most seem to be working towards today.  It would be of great benefit to achieve it, and Web 2.0 principles and technologies will be a great help in achieving it.   The latter scenario should be what we should be striving for - not only delivering the data and information held, or licensed, by the university, but also extracting the massive value in the links and references between that data. 

The emergence of Semantic Web technologies holds out the possibility of being able to deliver on the ambitions implicit in that second scenario.  Whilst getting to grips with Web 2.0 we should look beyond it to Semantic Web (often labelled Web 3.0) techniques and technologies and release the value locked up in the links between the data we create and hold.

I the bags of those that attended JISC 2008 there was a card inviting those that are interested in sharing their thoughts, experience, and ideas about how we step beyond the current confines of the VLE, portal, repository, and library, to register their interest in being invited to attend a Talis Research Day on the subject.  If you have a keen interest in learning, teaching and research and are excited by emerging technologies and would like to attend - register your interest.

Silo photo published by Zesmerelda in Flickr.

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December 21, 2007

Karen Calhoun
Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
6565 Kilgour Place
Dublin, OH 43017-3395 USA

Dear Karen,

Thank you for publishing your response to the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. You’ll forgive me if my open letter to you is a little less formal.

The working group’s draft presents the library world with a rallying point around which it can choose to really move forwards into the internet age in a way that it has not managed to achieve so far. You hold a unique position of power, this is clear from the fact that you get a mention in the working group report. But with great power comes great responsibility, and for anyone who’s watched Spiderman, it’s clear that often means giving things up.

Reading between the lines your response seems to be saying that you are, in fact, better placed and better qualified than the Library of Congress to take on the role of national data provider. That may very well be the case, you are certainly better funded - their budget of around $387 million for the national library has to work very hard looking after more than 134 million items as well doing all the other great work they do.

On the other hand, you have more than $234 million of your customers money to spend each year, without any items to look after. You also have nearly half-a-billion dollars sat aside to dip into should you have to do something big and important.

So if the community were to rally behind you as the centre of an effort to truly modernise, what would they have to demand of you?

Firstly, the community should insist you open up more. OCLC’s Office of Research gives quite a lot, but on the whole you could do more. The Library of Congress data is unambiguously in the public-domain, at least within the US. The community should demand that the data you manage on their behalf should be Open too. That would mean removing some of the technical controls you have in place, but most of all removing the restrictive terms you put in your membership contracts. The community should then protect any further contributions of their data by making them under a license such as the Open Data Commons License. Of course, lots of people would like to see LC move further in opening up too.

Secondly, the community should insist that the software they have paid you to write should be open-source. To say that you have released your FRBR algorithm when most librarys have no real chance of implementing it is somewhat disingenuous; give them the code. To say that crosswalks can be accessed through a web service is great, but not for everyone; give them the code. That would make Devon happy too, he wants his awesome work shared.

Thirdly, the community should insist you become more inclusive. Invite some vendors’ developers to join in the Grid Developer Network, or just invite everyone and see who comes. Tell everyone they’re free to blog about anything you’re doing - including your staff. Invite me to your symposium at ALA in June. Start a series of webcasts with great speakers who can influence the community.

Finally, the community should insist that you let go of control. That means not locking people in, it means not promoting worse solutions over better solutions just because you own the Copyright on the worse one - it means providing the tools for libraries to move from DDC to LCSH or MESH as well as the tools to move to it.

This last point is the key, letting go of control, as Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman describe it - the difference between the starfish and the spider. At the moment you’re a spider, but using the web as a platform means being a starfish. Skype, Craigslist, the many peer-to-peer networks, email and the very web itself all work precisely because Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf before him understood they had to let go of centralised control. Tim Berners-Lee got a Knighthood for letting go of control. We can’t promise you one, but you’d certainly earn the adulation of your peers.

Right now you’re too controlling, too centralised, too judgemental of your members, you’re a spider. Even your new logo with its big blue abdomen, green body and cute little orange head is just crying out for eight marker-pen legs, two marker-pen eyes and a cheeky little marker-pen smile. But the web wasn’t spun by spiders, it’s far more like the communication trails left by ants, another interesting social species.

The WoGroFuBiCo (as William Denton calls them) are asking the community to become a starfish, you need to stop being a spider.

Again, many thanks for making your response open and giving us a chance to widen the debate. Merry Christmas to all at OCLC from all of us here at Talis.

Respectfully,

Rob Styles
Geek, Talis

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So, the Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control released their draft for public comment last week.

The draft contains 5 high level recommendations broken down into many smaller, detailed recommendations. The amount of detail in the 41 page report is impressive with some very focussed thoughts and very clear statements about what to do next, both for the LC and the wider community.

As well as reading the draft report you can watch the working group present their findings to LC, recorded a few weeks ago.

1. INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF BIBLIOGRAPHIC PRODUCTION

The first recommendation is about making the production, gathering, editing and flow of data as efficient as possible. The report makes recommendations ranging from mandating that publishers supply metadata as part of the CIP process (which LC already do) to ensuring that purchased datasets are not embargoed against sharing (hard to do given the business models of commercial data suppliers).

OCLC gets a special mention, saying that “OCLC’s business model has a real impact on the distributed system of bibliographic data exchange.” In our opinion that’s somewhat understating the case, certainly for those who aren’t members of the OCLC club. I’ve met many of the OCLC folks and they’re doing some great things, but they have a business model established before the net and having to protect that is damaging their members ability to participate in this networked world.

The thrust of the efficiency recommendations are about using data that’s already available. This comes in three flavours; contractual, ensuring that data is provided by suppliers and that data that has been purchased can be freely shared; technical, ensuring that crosswalks, converters etc are available to get this data into catalogues; and social, relaxing standards to accept existing data without effort over perfect data created from scratch.

There’s also an interesting piece on LC’s costs:

According to current congressional regulations, LC is permitted to recover only direct costs for services provided to others. As a result, the fees that the Library charges do not cover the most expensive aspect of cataloging: namely, the cost of the intellectual work. . The economics of creating LC’s products have changed dramatically since the time when the Library was producing cards for library catalogs. It is now time to reevaluate the pricing of LC’s product line in order to develop a business model that allows LC to more substantially recoup its actual costs.

Finding a business model that both allows distributed responsibility for the bibliographic data and allows LC to bring in more money is a big ask. Commercial organisations are struggling with exactly that right now; OCLC being the biggest amongst them. Given that LC data is not covered by any intellectual property rights (the work of federal employees does not qualify for Copyright protection and the US has no Database Right) I don’t see any practical way for LC to achieve both objectives.

If the management of the data can be successfully distributed then much of the cost would also be distributed. In this case, with the community as a whole producing much of the data, it becomes even more important to clarify the rights people have over the data. We’ve been working on this problem for a little while, releasing an initial draft license for this purpose (licensed community generated data) more than a year ago and having recently released further drafts for comment. We’ve funded legal work and expect to have some more news on progress with our data license here very soon.

Also included in this first recommendation is some discussion of internationalising and expanding the Authorities data. I’m not sure I see this as an efficiency gain, but bringing together authorities from national libraries in many languages and reconciling them has the potential to revolutionise global bibliographic search. This work is already underway and, as long as the data is free for all to use, will be a great endeavour. This, in my mind, is the most compelling reason for LC to be asking for more funding and clearer national mandate.

2. ENHANCE ACCESS TO RARE AND UNIQUE MATERIALS

This second section focusses on one aspect of libraries that has competitive advantage over anything else - obscure stuff. The obvious example here in the UK is St John Rylands with their manuscripts, but every library has its own unique and interesting pieces. The same arguments around data as in section come up again - with a recommendation to focus on at least some access to all resources rather than having some perfectly catalogued and others not at all.

There are also calls to digitise these assets where possible and make them available online, partnering to do this where necessary.

I’ll jump on now, as section 3 and 4 float my boat a bit more.

3. POSITION OUR TECHNOLOGY FOR THE FUTURE

We have become slaves to MARC, so too have our systems vendors

That has to be the headline of this section; it’s a quote from Brian E. C. Schottlaender from the working group presentation of the draft to LC.

In my mind, MARC stands in that sentence as a placeholder for all of the library-centric, complex and web-hostile standards that we currently rely on. You could easily add Z39.50, NCIP and a host of ot