Library 2.0 Gang Member and Ex Libris Chief Strategy Officer, Oren Beit-Arie joins Richard Wallis in conversation about the recently announced Ex Libris Open Platform Strategy.

In the first part of this Talking with Talis conversation, they discuss the ramifications of the recent change of ownership when Francisco Partners sold their investment in Ex Libris to Leeds Equity Partners.   This sets the background for he rest of the podcast in which they go on to discus the motivation behind, and the details of the Open Platform Strategy.

In this revealing interview Oren describes how the strategy will influence the way Ex Libris develops and delivers its products in the future.

To accompany this podcast, we have made available a transcript of the interview.

 

 Oren Beit-Arie Talks with Talis [00:56:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Transcript - Oren Beit-Arie Talks with Talis: Download

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Martin Malmsten is from the LIBRIS department of the Royal Library of Sweden – LIBRIS being the discovery interface for the library.

Since joining as a software developer has been absorbed in to the world of library search and discovery.  He played a major part in the build and launch of the latest LIBRIS search interface which has introduced under the surface some Semantic Web and Linked Data features.

We discuss his career, the use of User Centered Design & Iterative Development methodologies, the Semantic Web techniques and technologies he used, and their future applicability to the library domain.

Items discussed in our conversation:

•  LIBRIS
• User-centered design and the next generation OPAC – a perfect match?
• RDF / Linked Data representations of cataloged data via LIBRIS:
  • URI for the Royal Library - http://libris.kb.se/resource/library/S
  • URI for the subject heading "Mödrar" (Mothers in English) - http://libris.kb.se/resource/auth/154863
  • URI for August Strindberg - http://libris.kb.se/resource/auth/94541
  • URI for the book "The difference Engine" - http://libris.kb.se/resource/bib/5060570
  • The book "The difference Engine" in OpenLink RDF browser - http://demo.openlinksw.com/DAV/JS/rdfbrowser/index.html?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flibris.kb.se%2Fresource%2Fbib%2F5060570
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

 

 Martin Malmsten Talks with Talis [00:44:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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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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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 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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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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Alejandro Garza over on the Stupendous Amazing Library blog, extrapolates the fact that there is very little partnership between library system vendors to conclude that they are not interested in interoperation between their systems.  He is picking up on extracts from the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study as commented upon by the Disruptive Library Technology Jester.

Coming from a history of integration protocols, in the library world, where they were more a framework for agreement than a standard, it is easy to assume that the only way to get two systems to talk is for their suppliers to establish a partnership to get it to work.  My least favourite standard NCIP is a classic in this regard. 

As I commented on the Jester’s post, the questions for the study were:

… in the present tense. Answering with ‘our products will integrate, etc., etc.’, would have no doubt drawn equal scepticism, but for different reasons.

The answers you picked out are symptomatic of an industry in transition. Transition from products without exception based on architectures that never envisioned light-weight loosely-coupled integration. Transition to a REST based service oriented architecture where integration between library and non-library applications should be simple and based on simple and open standards.

The “Do you have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?” question in the survey demonstrates an attachment to traditional thinking towards integration. So far, with the traditional heavy-weight protocols we are used to in the library world, the only reliable way to get integration that works has been through a partnership between suppliers. Web 2.0 has demonstrated that with simple light-weight protocols, integration is possible without the need for commercial partnerships. There are many benefits that arise from partnerships, but they shouldn’t be a prerequisite for successful integration.

It is not all doom and gloom though. Initiatives such as the DLF’s ILS API defining simple REST base protocols that all vendors should be able to support, have started to gather momentum in the last few months. A momentum that appears to be supported both by vendors and open source groups.

Since I made that comment I attended a JISC and SCONUL Library Management Systems Study Consultation Event in London.  This event was a get together of stakeholders in the UK academic library community, which were joined by representatives from system vendors for the afternoon session.  For those with a sadistic streak in must have made an entertaining spectacle, watching six vendor representatives (Ex Libris, Infor, Innovative, OCLC, SirsiDynix & Talis) trying to squeeze their views in to 5 minute slots.  From most of those presentations and the discussion that followed, it is clear that the vendors are just as much stakeholders in this as the rest of the community.

I feel there is a refreshing openness in opinion and approach that is starting to spread through the conversations in the world of library systems.   This openness has been in high evidence in the recent Library 2.0 Gang conversations on ILS APIs and Bolt-on OPACs. 

It was a good meeting in London, I only hope that the organisers can keep the momentum going and build a community around the concerns of all the stakeholders, vendors included.  If the initiative started by the study falls back in to the traditional model of projects and reports that we are used to, it will be a massive waste of an opportunity.

Back to my original question - do we need partnerships to enable interoperability?  No we don’t.  With loosely-coupled integration, facilitated by web native light-weight open APIs, interoperability should ‘just happen’.  Vendors should, and are starting to be in the position to, say my systems are open for you to interoperate with - who ever you are, partnership in place or not.  This won’t happen over night, but we are already on a new path, with a healthy does of credit for the DLF’s leadership in giving us some direction.

Photo from Flickr by Just.Luc.

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Apparently SirsiDynix will be unveiling the snappily named SirsiDynix Enterprise at the ALA Conference in Anaheim.

To quote an announcement email that recently passed under my gaze, it is their….

… new state-of-the-art faceted search solution that empowers libraries to make collections more searchable and discoverable than ever before.

How does SirsiDynix Enterprise deliver this power? With fuzzy search logic technology never before available to libraries, simplified search interfaces, deep integration with current OPACs, and much more.

The fuzzy search logic technology never before available to libraries  comes from Brainware a sister company to SirsiDynix in the portfolio of Vista Equity Partners.

With the launch of Starship SirsiDynix Enterprise they are boldly going in to the universe of bolt-on OPACs, which was discussed in this month’s episode of the Library 2.0 Gang with amongst others participants from OCLC, Innovative, and Aquabrowser.    Practically everybody has now entered this space, previously only inhabited by Aquabrowser and a few open source projects.  Anybody who is anybody has a new OPAC sporting faceted browsing, new indexing, and the ability to be bolted-on to somebody else’s library system.

It’s early days in this market as Carl Grant, who was also on the Library 2.0 Gang this month, is saying we need to evolve from bolt-on towards plug-in.

Back to the SirsiDynix announcement - with the ‘Star Wars’ credits imagery, the Star Trek naming, and emphasising the fuzziness - I wonder what they will be wearing on the stand in Anaheim?

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It was remiss of me not to mention,Talking with Talis interviewee, Mark Leggott’s announcement that the University of Prince Edward Island had become one of the first academic libraries to migrate to the open source library system Evergreen.  Their appropriately named Island Pines OPAC can be checked out here.

This was news in itself but the fact that the move from SirsiDynix Unicorn to Evergreen only took them a month, was even more impressive. A hat tip to Mark and his colleagues.

I was reminded of my omission by this post from Dan Scott.  Dan assisted Mark and his team by creating a utility script that should be of assistance to SirsiDynix Unicorn or Symphony sites who are interested in exploring the possibilities offered by other library systems.  These scripts use the Unicorn/Symphony API.

Mark Leggott insisted that Dan retained copyright over the scripts created during the UPEI migration, allowing him to share those scripts in the appropriate avenues. To that end Dan has shared them under a GPL v2 license.

You would think that the scripts are now available to all, but you would be wrong.  As Dan says:

I am sadly (to the best of my knowledge) not free to simply share the script with anyone. Therefore, to gain access to the script you must be an API-certified Unicorn or Symphony customer.

So if you are an API-certified Unicorn or Symphony customer, you can download Dan’s work from the Unicorn API repository - the first .org for which I have ever needed a username and password to login, before I get to see anything.

This put me in mind of the old riddle - When is a door not a door? - When it is ajar! - When is Open Source not Open Source - when you need an account with a vendor to get at it.

Presumably Dan can’t share his work with the world so as to stop unscrupulous people from getting to know the secret sauce of the Unicorn API, and thus being able to export data  from their SirsiDynix API.    Of course if you are a Unicorn customer, with access to your ILS API, you will be able to login to sirsiapi.org and use Dan’s scripts to export your data.  So that is all secure then - isn’t it?

Reading that last paragraph again, I’m still not clear who is protecting what from whom so that they couldn’t misuse the information to extract data from their own ILS in a way that would be detrimental to anyone.  If anyone can enlighten me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Door ajar picture from Éamonn on Flikr

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Vendors respond robustly to critical HE LMS report is the headline on the front of the latest issue of the CILIP Gazette.  What follows is the second in a two-part feature on the JISC/SCONUL study, which I have discussed in Panlibus previously, by Gazette contributor Tim Buckley Owen.

In preparation for this second article on the subject, Tim contacted the four vendors (Ex Libris, Innovative, SirsDynix, Talis) who between them provide over 90% of the UK higher education Library Systems, and asked them to comment on the report.

I would have linked to the article if it been available on line.  Unfortunately the Gazette’s web page only shows an out of date thumbnail of the latest issue.  So, here are some snippets from Tim’s article:

[the vendors] acknowledge that things need to change in university libraries, and are starting to develop new systems as a result - but it’s not always clear yet what those changes actually need to be.

‘We agree that the library management system, with its “traditional” scope and functionality, does not adequately address the expectations of end users,’ says Tamar Sadeh of ExLibris, which has developed its Primo discovery and delivery solution in response.  ‘If the LMS does not interoperate with other institutional systems and resources, it deserves to be bypassed and become irrelevant,’ agrees Talis’s Richard Wallis

‘There is no disagreement that users’ demand for information is morphing in new and exciting ways and that the library (and library systems) need to change to meet those needs,’ agrees Gene Shimshock of Innovative.  ‘However, interoperability is but a part of a rather complicated puzzle, a means to an end, and is not the sole factor in determining libraries’ relevancy.’

Stephen Abram