Project Xiphos represents an interesting fusion of much of our thinking over the past few years, from Library 2.0, to Open Data, to the Semantic Web, to an open and web-scale Platform upon which we and others can build compelling and cost-effective applications. All this, and more, comes together in Project Xiphos.

Here, we're rethinking the ways in which people, resources and the connections between them can be put to work in delivering a compelling blueprint for next generation systems that extend across those silos we today call libraries, repositories, virtual learning environments (or course management systems) and more. By placing the individual at the heart of the system, and drawing upon their network of peers, resources, connections and leads we are able to unlock the potential locked up inside so many of our institutional systems.

Project Xiphos is just beginning. We welcome your engagement and your participation, whether in person on 10 June, via the new Project Xiphos blog, in email, or however you feel best able to share.

Technorati Tags: Project Xiphos, jiscconference08, Talis

Just a quick note to let our readers know that we are moving this blog, Panlibus, from Movable Type to WordPress today.

Your feed readers should be redirected automatically... but if you do lose us please come back to the website and resubscribe from there.

See you on the other side!

Technorati Tags: Talis

After an enjoyable trip down to Australia with a great stop over day in Dubai (see personal blog post), I was welcomed in to Perth by that well known library blogger Kathryn Greenhill and her family.  If you are ever in Perth and want a tour of the area, I can recommend looking Kathryn up - her family were so welcoming.

Yesterday I met with some interesting people at Curtin University of Technology, and my all to short stay in Perth culminated in the presentation at the State Library followed by a  meal in an excellent local India restaurant.

An early morning flight tomorrow takes me on to Melbourne, for a further couple of seminars, organised in association with Caval, who also were responsible for organising the one in Perth.  Then Hobart, Tasmania, is my destination to meet with people from the other TALIS.

The end of my trip will be in Canberra for the National Library of Australia's Innovative Ideas Forum, but more of that in future posts.

Technorati Tags: Perth, Web 2.0, Australia, Library, Talis

Susan was demonstrating the 360 COUNTER product, launched last year. One of the most interesting features she demonstrated enables users to upload reports from the publisher website into the 360 archive. Impressively, if the publisher subsequently amends the statistics, then Serials Solutions will automatically update the uploaded version. Serials Solutions also have an eye on Web 2.0 and hope to be making a wiki available for their customers in the near future.

My own presentation was on the first day. Entitled “Opportunities for collaboration in ERM using new web technologies”, it was gratifying to see that its central themes – collaboration, openness and sharing were reflected in abundance across the conference programme. My session, which focused on the application of Web 2.0 and semantic web technologies to back office e-resource operations was very well received, but I take my hat off to Jonathan Blackburn and Mason Hall from Florida State University for making the subject of community-centred knowledgebases more entertaining than a stand-up comic at the top of his game. How on earth did they manage to do that and at the same time deliver a deadly serious call to action around opening up data, uncoupling data and services, and supporting Open Source initiatives? See www.libraryokra.com for further details.

Along similar lines, Karen Coyle’s Opening Keynote speech was a clarion call for open data. She urged libraries to let their users freely re-use bibliographic data, even if we don’t like what they actually do with it. She argued cogently that with the semantic web, the library could be the killer app, as we have the best data.

In sessions that focused closely on ERM systems, there was a great deal of curiosity about those libraries who have just implemented Ex Libris’ Verde product. Over and above general problems implementing what is clearly a highly complex application, there was concern expressed about insufficient space for storing licensing data. Ex Libris promised to address this problem.

Deberah England from Wright State University is an Innovative customer, and she described how she’s adapted eTracker, a tracking system, which was being used by their IT department for troubleshooting, to her ERM work, to supplement and integrate with Innovative’s ERM system. She made the point that none of the ERMSs on the market address tracking problems well. That is certainly a shortcoming that Talis is seeking to address with our Xedio project. Kristen Blake and Jacquie Samples, meanwhile, reported on their project at North Carolina’s State University to develop an organization name authority tool, a relatively new concept in ERM, to rationalize data such as “Elsevier Science Inc”, “Elsevier Science Ltd” and so forth.

For my money, one of the most interesting session was delivered by Dave Stout from Bepress Services and yet another hot topic - the institutional repository. Well there was no elephant in this room. Straight away, Dave exposed the failure of libraries engage successfully with faculties to maximize take-up of institutional repositories, because the library vision has not extended beyond digital preservation, an issue which faculties have very little understanding or appreciation of. So the session focused instead on the interesting uses to which a small number of US colleges are putting their IRs. It was fascinating to see examples of faculties actually publishing eJournals on their IR. These tend to be titles unsuited to mainstream publishing – such as regional titles (“California Agriculture”) or niche titles (McMaster’s “Bertrand Russell” journal). But the story doesn’t stop with journal publishing. Faculties are also organizing conferences and workshops within the repository, by using it to call for papers, and manage the submission and review of conference papers, as well as reviewing and tracking grant proposals, and other interesting activities. Apparently, size and resources are no longer barriers, with small colleges and even groups of students doing impressive things. It’s low cost, and best of all, it enables academics to engage on their own terms with IRs, which as a result are becoming highly creative and collaborative spaces.

So all in all, there may have been more sessions on usage statistics than on any other subject at Atlanta, but collaboration and openness were threads that ran through the entire conference.

In our latest podcast I talk with Larry Johnson, Alan Levine and Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium. We discuss the 2008 edition of their Horizon Report, exploring both their methods and the wide-ranging implications for Higher Education of their findings.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [62 mins, 59Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Delphi method
• Doodle
• Gartner
• Horizon.museum
• The Horizon Report, 2008
• Horizon Project wiki
• New Media Consortium
• NMC Symposium on Mashups, April 1-3 2008.
• Ning
• Pachyderm
• xobni

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Wednesday 26 March, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

Technorati Tags: New Media Consortium, Horizon Report 2008, Semantic Web, Talis, Talking with Talis

Fiona Launched the blog Semantic Library, to help her find out more about the Semantic Web.  We discuss what she has discovered from the blog and the relevance of the Semantic Web to libraries.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [32 mins, 29Mb]

During the conversation we mention:

• The Talis Semantic Web blog - Nodalities
• Paul Miller's blog The Semantic Web
• John Blyberg's presentation - Beyond the OPAC: The Semantic Web [pdf]
• Read Write Web
• Web Worker Daily
• Mashable

This conversation was conducted as a Skype call on Wednesday 12th March 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

Technorati Tags: Fiona Bradley, Semantic Web, Semantic, Library, Talis, IFLA, Podcast, Talking with Talis

Ever since I came across, what I call their kitchen sink demonstration OPAC (they have put practically everything except the kitchen sink, in to related information around the results) I have been impressed with what they are up to.

The Wiki, has an Our Prototypes page upon which can be found links to, and descriptions of, three prototype interfaces: The NBD Prototype - the official name for demonstrator I mentioned; The Beta Catalogue - a VuFind fronted re-engineering of the National Library's catalogue; The Single Business Prototype - a proof of concept for providing a single discovery interface to all the library's current and future discovery services.  The page also gives a heads up that a Newspaper Search and Delivery Service is on its way.

The home page of the Wiki proclaims:

We are particularly interested in forming a community of Australian business analysts and developers who are working on similar problems and who are interested in  interoperable, standards-based solutions that can foster the development of a national information infrastructure. We are also interested in working with colleagues at an international level to provide prototypes and testbeds for new and emerging standards.

An also:

At the National Library of Australia we have started to redevelop our digital library services using a service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions where these are functional and robust.

Putting these two together it is good to see the promotion of open standards and open software both within and outside of Australia.

This picks up on the themes from last month's Code4lib 2008 conference, as described by Rob.  It is time we all started to cooperate around the innovative work going on globally.

Technorati Tags: NLA, Library Labs, Talis, Library, Open Source

As hinted at earlier this month, the Gang is to be convened on a monthly basis to discuss the topics of the day.

For each show I will be joined by several contributors drawn from a pool of regulars from the world of libraries and the technologies that influence them.

The first show in the new series is a great example of the type of interesting and informative discussion you can expect from The Library 2.0 Gang.   It takes its inspiration from the themes that emerged from the Code4lib 2008 conference in Portland, last month.  The subjects covered being the Open Library, ILS APIs, and new Cataloguing Influences.   The gang of regulars John Blyberg, Nicole C. Engard, Carl Grant, Char Booth, and Rob Stlyes were joined by our guest for the month Aaron Swartz of The Open Library.

Get your self across to The Library 2.0 Gang site, or to LibraryJournal.com, through where it is being syndicated, and have a listen.

As I say in the show, I am interested in your input for topics, questions, guests, and even regular contributors for the gang.  Droop me an email to librarygang@talis.com - I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Library 2.0 Gang, L2G, Talis, Library, Open Library, LibraryJournal, Podcast

Thanks to Karen Schneider twittering about Mann's Opus, I picked up Thomas Mann's response to the report.

Thomas' response is entitled "On the Record" but Off the Track: A Review of the Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control, With a Further Examination of Library of Congress Cataloguing Tendencies

Mann starts his response with a section of major points, starting with the statement that:

The Working Group's Report is off the track in many of its major assumptions, assertions, and recommendations

That's a pretty strong statement, and what follows in 38 pages would do even Annoyed Librarian proud.

Over on Cataloguing Futures, Christine Schwartz describes the report as a must-read, Karen Schneider comments

How could I *not* love this report?

arkham sums up my feelings better, commenting

First, I ended up skipping a large amount of it, when it became abundantly clear that the majority of the paper is a long rant (and lecture) on how important LCSH and LCSH left-anchored browse are and how they work - and don't work in an Amazoogle environment.

And this ranting style is what I struggle with most about the points, I agree with much of the sentiment, and having spoken to several folks at LC I think the WoGroFuBiCo do too.

The WoGroFuBiCo report treats much of what Mann deems important with a light touch not because it is unimportant, but because the library world has been doing stuff well for many, many years. The things it focuses on, moving onto the web more wholly and in a more embracing way.

WoGroFuBiCo is about stepping out into the world once more, not abandoning everything we hold dear.

... we've released a new API that lets you link easily to any of our books. Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.

Like several others, we at Talis got an early heads up on the release of the API and within a few hours the Browse on Google Book Search link appeared on Cenote the Open User interface to UK bibliographic holdings stored in the Talis Platform, and a demonstration prototype of the upcoming new Talis OPAC interface - Prism 3.

If you have an ISBN, LCCN, or OCLC and pass it to the API you will get back a flag to say if Google have the book, and the URL to link to if they have.  Anyone with access to the html of your page and a modicum of Javascript knowledge can soon get this working.

As highlighted in another Google post about the API, several libraries have already implemented the link in their interfaces, including:

• Ann Arbor District Library
• Plymouth State University
• University of California
• University of Huddersfield
• Waterford Institute of Technology

And other online catalogue sites such as:

• LibraryThing
• Open Library
• Scriblio

I expect a blizzard of posts and Press Releases as the feature appears like a rash across the worlds OPACs - Ex Libris already being near the front of the queue.

A holder of rich metadata opens up an API that makes it easy to create mashups with that data in user interfaces - isn't that what the web world was raving about a couple of years back - you remember that Web 2.0 thingy. 

So why so much excitement about this announcement now?  It is because it is about book data - everyone relates to books and the library world has been so bad at opening up its data to do this - it is down to Google to do it for us. Also system vendors in our world are notorious for making it difficult to do this kind of thing.

Ex Libris, Talis, and others are demonstrating that the sleeping giant of the library systems world is at least flickering an eyelid in recognition that the world around them has changed.  How long before it fully awakens to the fact that the future systems will be mashups of components and services from commercial, open source, and many currently non-library vendor organisations.  Moves like the DLF ILS API initiative will only add momentum to this process - if only everyone will get out of the way, cooperate and let the inevitable happen.

Technorati Tags: Google Book Search, API, Ex Libris, DLF, ILS, Library, Talis, Cenote

From library assistant in East Kilbride to Director of SLIC, Elaine has had a long career in and around Public Libraries in Scotland.  For a significant amount of that time she was associated with library systems, which has been a great help in her current position.

We discuss her career; the role of SLIC/CILIP in Scotland; the differences and advantages of working through the Scottish Government; and past and current SLIC projects.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [45 mins, 41Mb]

This conversation was conducted as a SkypeOut call on Wednesday 5th March 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

Technorati Tags: Elaine Fulton, Libraries, Scotland, SLIC, CILIP, Talis, Podcast

The road to this enlightened agreement has been a long one.  Back in 2005 John Blyberg, then at AADL put forward his ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights containing demands such as "Open, read-only, direct access to the database" and "A full-blown, W3C standards-based API to all read-write functions".  John soon followed this up by producing PatREST an API on top of Ann Arbour's Innovative Millennium system.

Winding the clock, and lots of blog posts, forward a couple of years and there is enough momentum for the DLF to set up it's ILS Discovery API Task Force.  This group following a survey, have come up with a Draft Recommendation for the functionally of an ILS API.

Wind on again to March 6th 2008 - the recommendations are discussed in a meeting in San Francisco attended by many of the library system vendors, open source projects and other interested parties (Serials Solutions, Proquest, Ex Libris, CDL, Endeca, III, NLM, LoC, University of Maryland, UCLA, OCLC, Vanderbilt University, Oregon State University, XC, Bibliocommons, VuFind).

The word from the meeting is that the vendors appeared to be luke-warm to say the least about the proposals - pushing for any circulation functionality, holds etc., to be removed from the spec.  I understand that one vendor claimed that it would not be possible to harvest MARC records from their system.

Wind back a tiny bit to a breakout session at Code4lib 2008, hosted by Emily Lynema (previous Talking with Talis guest).  This was a very positive meeting with discussion about the way we could all come together to turn the recommendations in to a reality.  There was consensus that the Open Source community could have a significant part to play in this.  A common theme in this session was that there could be little help for this expected from the established ILS vendors - as appears to have been confirmed in San Francisco.

A suggestion was made that an open community could share ways to access both Open Source and commercial ILSs.  This would then help others build ILS specific connectors for implementations of the DLF standard API.  Then came the jaw-dropping question - "could such contributions to the community be made anonymously, so that the person making it would not bring retribution down on them, and their employer, from their vendor?".

Have we really come to such a sorry state in parts of our industry that efforts to open up access, to data in University and Public Libraries for the benefit of all library users, can only be done by subverting normal openness and cooperation.  It's their data after all!

Those that staff the vendors, which some of the library technologists at Code4lib are afeard of, have obviously never read the Cluetrain Manifesto - or at least if they did, they didn't get it.

Markets are conversations!

Picture shared by biverson on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: ILS, API, DLF, III, SirsiDynix, Ex Libris, Talis, Library, Open Source, Code4lib, Code4libcon2008, Cluetrain Manifesto, John Blyberg, Emily Lynema

Mark an avid promoter of Open Source solutions, talks about the need for an open shared knowledgebase for journals, before moving on to describe his work at UPEI.

With the aid of Open Source software such as Drupal and Fedora, Mark has enabled the delivery of a holistic solution to learning, administration and research across the University.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [60 mins, 55Mb]

Resources referenced in the conversation:

• Open is as Open Does: Pulling Success Out of the Open Hat
• UPEI
• Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain...
• Repository Redux [video] - Access 2007
• Encyclopedia of Life
• Drupal
• FedoraCommons
• Moodle 

This conversation was conducted as a Skype call on Tuesday 5th March 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

Technorati Tags: Mark Leggott, UPEI, Knowledgbase, Serials, Library, Drupal, FedoraCommons, Moodle, Open Source, Semantic Web, Podcast, Talking with Talis, Talis

The great news is that the Gang will be back - this month!  The first show in a new improved regular Talis Library 2.0 Gang series is being recorded this week and, subject to technical wizardry, should be heading towards a podcast player near you, next week.

The format of the show will be a regular, same time every month, round-table podcast.  As chair I will be joined by several contributors drawn from a pool of regulars from the world of libraries, to discuss the topics of the day.  Each month we will be joined a guest relevant to one of the topics under discussion.

The topics for the first show will be influenced by issues raised at the recent code4lib 2008 conference in Portland Oregon, such as The Open Library, ILS APIs, and new approaches to cataloguing.

Invitations for regular contributors have been sent far and wide, including well known names from organisations such as LibraryThing, Library Journal, OCLC, LibLime, SirsiDynix, and Care Affiliates - many of whom have already responded positively.

I am also pleased to announce that The Library 2.0 Gang is to be syndicated through LibraryJournal.com to reach an even wider audience of Gang devotees. 

This won't just be a one way affair.  Beyond being your regular monthly update on the topics of the day, we want you to get involved.  On the first show you will hear me appealing for your ideas for topics and guests for following shows.   Ask the gang a question - email me your questions, lighthearted or on the big topics of the day. I hope to include questions from listeners in every show.  I will be setting up a Talis Library 2.0 Gang email address for your contributions, but in the meantime you can contact me direct - richard.wallis@talis.com.

Technorati Tags: Library 2.0 Gang, Podcast, Talking with Talis, Library Journal, Talis, code4libcon2008, code4lib

In the air once again, not quite on the way home, but on the way to the Open Library developers meet in San Francisco. A first chance to see the bridge for me.

But I'll talk more about Open Library after hearing what folks there have to say, for now I need to tell you all about Code4Lib 2008...

Where to start? With three and a half packed days of workshops, breakouts, prepared talks and lightning talks as well as the evening socialising there's just too much to cover. The conference was so well organised in fact that longer standing members of the Code4Lib community wondered if they were at the right conference. Roy Tennant's absence this year also left some folks confused and disoriented.

My time began with some folks from LibLime who ran a great pre-conference session, as did Equinox (who do a lot of the work on Evergreen); no I wasn't in two places at once. I spent the morning listening to Josh, Galen and Henri talking about Koha and Richard spent the morning with the Equinox crew talking Evergreen. They're both great systems and I have to say getting Koha up and running to do some dev work on it was oh so simple. Dan Chudnov also got a pre-un-conference together, reports from that were good, but I didn't quite catch what was discussed there.

The conference proper started on Tuesday, the organisation mostly done by Jeremy Frumkin of Oregon State. His organisation was so good that when he had to leave unexpectedly on the morning of day 2 it was easy for Ed Corrado, Dan Scott, Dan Chudnov and Ross Singer to step in and hold the reigns. Ross made a fantastic MC introducing each speaker in true Oscar's style.

But enough name-checking, what about the meat of the sessions?

I spoke this year, and I knew I had a tough act to follow when I saw that I was straight up after Brewster Kahle's keynote. Brewster is disarmingly witty and unassuming. Known best for his role at Internet Archive he talked about that a bit and about the Open Library project. Brewster used the occasion to announce that Talis are supporting the effort by donating the millions of records that form our 40 year-old union catalogue to Open Library. This gives Open Library a great boost of UK material including records about older rare and out-of-print stuff.

Brewster's perspective on life seems to be that things "can't be that hard" and that if you just make a start then you'll see how far you can get. This approach has worked well for Internet Archive and appears to be working well for Open Library too. Perhaps we could all do with a bit more of that give-it-a-go approach in library land.

I followed Brewster with a piece about mining MARC data for relationships, a piece of R&D I've been working on for some time now. The Code4Lib channel occupants asked me to assume no prior knowledge of RDF, which we've been using to describe the relationships, and a load of people told me it was the first time they understood what RDF was about, so I'm chuffed with that. I'll be presenting a very different side of that work at WWW2008 in April.

In the lightning talks, Andrew Bullen stunned us all with a beautiful piece, set to music, about the robber baron George Pullman, his carriages and the most wonderful music. He's been scanning the sheet music of Pullman car classics, converting them to midi and releasing them in an archive of midi and MP3 files. Beautiful work that got him huge applause. There is a suggestion that his work should appear in a Code4Lib Journal article soon; that would make a nice sequel to his article on Historical Demographic Data in the town of Pullman.

Jodi Schneider, Ed Corrado and Jonathan Brinley talked us through the Code4Lib Journal, a fully-fledged journal (with its own ISSN, even!). The journal works through a small committee of editors and technical staff to produce a web-based journal once each quarter; they're looking for new members for the team right now.

David Walker then covered the WorldCat API nicely in his talk about working with it to create a prototype local catalogue, very similar to what we've seen of WorldCat Local. It's great to see OCLC letting their customers get at their data through this kind of API. The Grid services look like a great step forward for those who are members of the OCLC club.

Karen Coyle keynoted day two in her inimitable style, getting cheers, laughs and the occasional grumble of dissatisfied agreement from her audience. If there were ever an audience in almost total appreciation of Karen's perspective, efforts and humour it would be Code4Lib. Taking us on a whistle-stop tour of RDA, RDF, the efforts of the RDA/DCMI folks and a sideways dig at Michael Gorman (best known in Code4Lib for Revenge of the Blog People!) she had us all hanging on her every word.

Karen's talk included the introduction of FUQ lists (frequently unanswered questions), pronounced somewhat dangerously (see photo, right). You really have to watch the video (when it's published) to do Karen's keynote justice!

Corey Harper also did a piece on RDF/RDA toward the end of day 3; he did a great job at not repeating Karen (or me) and really got a lot of people further interested in why the DCAM work is really important.

Biblios, presented by Chris Catalfo, followed Karen and showed us all how good a web-based cataloguing interface really could be. I saw Biblios in its early stages, when it showed great promise. It now provides a slick, standalone cataloguing UI with plugins at the back to allow records to be stored and retrieved in different stores; that means it can be bolted onto any ILS. Very nice work Chris.

Emily Lynema and Terry Reese presented on the DLF ILS work to establish a common API spec across all ILSs, work we've been starting on here with Jangle. Ross did a great job of talking to various folks about how Jangle could fit in with the DLF efforts and Terry and Emily ran a fantastic breakout session for interested people to see how we can all drive forward with the DLF effort. This work follows on nicely from Emily's Free The Data presentation from last year. Emily and Tito Sierra also did a slot on Talking with Talis last year.

Aaron Swartz did a great slot on the building of Open Library, including an explanation of ThingDB, this had a lot in common with Dan Scott's talk on CouchDB. Both talks explained a lot about the benefits of extensible schema and both have a lot in common with RDF stores.

The chatter and banter in the Code4Lib IRC channel was, as always, inciteful, witty and good humored. I'm always pleased to see how well the smaller Code4Lib channel community opens up to the larger group of conference attendees - while there were several in-jokes floating around for the three days, everyone was welcomed and everyone supported in presenting.

That's what really makes Code4Lib a very different style of conference. Around two-thirds of attendees also stood up to present, whether a session, a breakout or a lightning talk and that's truly extra-ordinary.

To get a more emotional feel for the conference, you should check out the photos of code4lib 2008 on Flickr

Thanks to the efforts of Noel Pedens, videos will appear here sometime soon.

Next year is in Providence, RI, hosted by Brown University - thank goodness it's on the east coast.