Talis Insight 07 Conference - Marshall Breeding - Working toward a new model of library automation

Marshall Breeding is well known in the field of library automation, maintaining the website http://www.librarytechnology.org/. His talk is based on a recent survey of librarians attitudes to current
systems/vendors and the emerging open source market.

His scan of the current state of the market pointed out that no successful recent new systems (e.g. latest version of Horizon was abandoned), the current crop date mainly from
the mid-90s. Recent mergers have reduced choice, and even newer systems such as Evergreen are doing the same things as existing systems.

This has been accompanied with increasing dissatisfaction as they fail to keep pace with customers expectations of innovation. Nowadays there are very few voluntary migrations to lateral systems. There is a need to focus on e-resources, the user experience etc, and this could encourage less integrated systems with a core system to which is bolted on a discovery layer, link resolver, federated search tool.

Companies are beginning to get involved in library automation who are not traditional system vendors e.g. OCLC, Bowker.

Marshall spoke at length about the Open Source alternatives which are garnering a lot of attention. Ultimately the Total Costs of Ownership are similar to that of a proprietary system. OS will penetrate the mainstream when TCOs are well documented enough to stand up to objective procurement. Currently OS systems are very similar in functionality to commercial systems but their impact could disrupt the status quo by

injecting competition into the market
increase pressure to innovate
increase pressure to decrease costs
make systems more open

We need to work towards a new ILS vision, e.g. current systems are based on workflows cast > 25 years ago, e-resources now represent >50% of our resources, many systems have large gaps e.g. ILL, collection development,
binding, remote storage.

Alongside OS software we need to consider more open access to data open APIs, ideally industry standard which would allow access to all components of functionality

Can these be open and commercial? Marshall advocates ILSs becoming more lightweight as modules become interoperable, with a single point of management for each function.

Our current legacy systems have created artificial boundaries we need to redefine these i.e.

PAC / portal

Circulation / ILL / Remote Storage

Collection Development / Acquisitions / Budget management

The first stage of this has begun with the separation of the front-end (PAC) by using next-genration discovery tools/interface. Technology cycle is much faster at the front-end and this is only a small part of the library ILS

We should see a move towards service-oriented business architecture where web services allow the flexibility to weave a fabric of changing applications. This could lead to greater enterprise operability and open the door to massively consolidated implementations, of scaled up consortia.

The 'Global Enterprise' of Google, OCLC, Worldcat etc has to be tackled - what is our relationship with these? How can we leverage our content in enterprise discovery systems to drive users toward library resources e.g. by exposing the metadata.

We have to consider the place of MARC not only in an XML- based world, but also in a post-metadata world where users are searching the digital objects themselves.

'Web destinations' such as Amazon are now competing with libraries, increasing the pressure on us.

We have to break out of the marketing/consumer model when dealing with vendors and move towards dialogue and increased partnership.

Evolution or Revolution? Web 2.0 has invigorated libraries and it may be has provided the catalyst for the latter.

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Dave Pattern - OPAC 2.0: Teaching the Pig to Sing

Dave is someone I've been keeping an eye on for a while with some really clever, innovative work at the University of Huddersfield.

The 'Does your OPAC suck?' meme has been bouncing around the blogsphere for some time now, with server reports on user disengagement with libraries and the emergence of web 2.0 introducing a richer online experience.

A survey received over 700 responses with results and analysis here: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/239/

Dave then started to look at how people were using Huddersfield's OPAC. he combined this with user suggestions from surveys, 2.0 inspired features and borrowing ideas from other websites to create a 'perpetual beta' OPAC where features are launched with low/no publicity and monitored. The most critical feature of this was that it required a staff buy-in and a willingness to take risks.

He started by monitoring keyword searches and discovered 1 in 4 gave zero results, most OPACs presented users with a dead end, unlike good search engines which gave 'Did you mean?' replies. Many users just walked away. They already had a spell-check, but this didn't allow for searches which were e.g. too specific. They cross-referenced keywords with answers.com to provide new suggestions. He discovered that hyperlinked terms in wikepedia make good keywords producing serendipitous searches.

The next stage was mining the data in circulation statistics to produce links to 'people who borrowed this also borrowed' titles. As for introducing user-created content, he started with ratings first then comments (which are more popular with staff than students). Neither were promoted but have some use, comments are moderated by Dave (they allow anonymous posting).

The most popular service spellchecking. The 'also borrowed' functionality has increased in popularity by 300-400% since it was launched. Users seem to be browsing more.

There were major issues around staff acceptance

There was no formal process for discussing and agreeing new OPAC features, so the organised a web 2.00 afternoon.

There was initial scepticism from staff

• would students think the 'also borrowed' link were formal recommendation?
• would sudden changes confuse users?

The solutions were to:

• encourage suggestions from staff
• include users in decision-making
• encourage play & experimentation
• don't be afraid of mistakes
• look around for ideas
• build crappy prototypes fast
• monitor usage - if poor then remove it.

He then demonstrated some ideas in visualisation and some of the 'next generation' discovery tools out there (see the LibraryShed for details)

Daves shopping list of Library 2.0 features included

• spell checking
• relevancy ranking
• recommendations (manual and automatically generated)
• improved serendipity
• user participation

In general it rakes 2 years to library acceptance, results from his survey indicate that the US is some way ahead of the UK

Dave's full presentaion on slideshare

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Ken Chad - Scanning the LMS Market in the UK

Thought provoking scan of the current and potential future state of the UK market.

The public library market is worth £20m annually, 4 vendors have 80% of the business.

In HE 4 vendors have 87% of the market (Ex-Libris, Talis & SirsiDynix have 23% each, Innovative 18%)

These figures indicate an mature market. A potential new player in the public sector is Civica, while OCLC now own a significant number of for-profit companies.

The emergence of Private Equity Partners in the market could have significant effects. As a rule of thumb, PEPs look for companies that will offer growth within 5 years looking for opportunities in acquisition, new geographies/sectors, and new technology driven opportunities. [We've seen this in the library market - LC] Typically they will own a company for 5-7 years.

The public library sector is under pressure to look towards integration to provide savings e.g. Leeds saving £10k/year by integrating e-invoicing and finance systems.

As well as PEPs companies such as Google, AbeBooks, Amazon and LibraryThing are now offering services which compete with libraries.

An example of how books might change The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom which is a freely available PDF where comment and related material is collated into a wiki.

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Peter Godwin - From Google to YouTube to SecondLife: The Challenge to Information Literacy

A lively session, lots of slides, videos and audience interaction.

Some key concepts:

The content has left the container.

Research (in the library) is now self-directed, non-linear and based on trial and error.

Cut and paste culture rather than Read and Digest.

Authority is less clear cut - we need new metrics of assessment.

Information literacy should not be considered a given.

Some potentialities:

Working with students on Youtube

Using tagging to help students to think of keywords

From Library Videos - the best of

Conveniently located next to the stapler ... The Otis Library Tour

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Andy Latham - The Elegance Of Integrated Services

Since the earlier session overran I missed the beginning of this. It covered how Queens University Belfast were using Talis Keystone to integrate the library with university-wide business processes. They have used Keystone to integrate with their (Sharepoint) portal

Some interesting points from their policies:

NHS staff users are added into the University directory in order to integrate identity management.

They no longer loan to users with any outstanding fines, so to make payments as easy as possible they use worldpay for credit card payments, min £5 and has to be full payment, but are looking to smartcards for the future.

This required a lot of co-operation between the library, IT and Finance departments (as well as Talis)

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Tony Hey - eScience, Scholarly Communication and the Transformation of Research Libraries

Research is changing - becoming ever more data-centric. Data curation is the biggest challenge facing the research community (and libraries?).

He labels researchers as as 'extreme information workers', where data is exposed and relying on software as services.

He talks about the future of scholarly publishing, emphasising the rate of change and how it has to adapt, making reference to 'As we may read' by Paul Ginsparg, and the development of arXiv.

He stresses that webometrics will become increasingly important and uses the example of the University of Southampton, whch has a much higher ranking in relation to it's size, mainly because of it's research output visibility.

[For libraries this asks the question - are we measuring the right things with regard to the various statistics we collect?]

(note: Southhampton is the home of Eprints and have long been a leader in repository development and policy)

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Keynote - What will ‘Businesslike’ mean when business isn’t like business anymore?

Formerly head of Knowledge Management at the BBC, Euan Semple initiated a collaborative knowledge environment there, starting from the first interactive system of an online forum.

Concentrating not on the development of technology, but how the technology initiated communication across the organisation. he used the example of where someone had a query regarding expenses policy which got several different answers, as well as a link to the official policy. Even beyond that, it highlighted different implementations of that policy in different departments. The forum didn't create the cultural issues, but highlighted them.

He was less enamoured of traditional knowledge networks 'knowledge coffins', taxonomies which fail because they are too proscriptive. He contrasts this with blogs, which can create networks of ideas by using permalinks, and used a visualisation of the wikpedia entry on the London bombings to illustrate how wikis are the most auditable of documents.

He emphasises that the more open the system the greater the response; and that openness engenders trust. The environment has to be wholeheartedly embraced from the top down, and policies developed from the bottom up. At the BBC there were >5000 wikis.

His own attitude was one of enthusiasm - his use of tagging and RSS to interact with networks of interest. He defined his view of the semantic web as linking "Oh, that's interesting!" sites/services/nodes.

He cited tools which could be used to connect people e.g.

Facebook

Twitter (microblogging)

Plazes (similar but automatically updates with your location)

Dracos.co.uk - tracks BBC News homepage changes

Talis Insight 07 Conference - Introductory Post

[Posts transferred from my previous workblog] I'll summarise this conference session by session in a series of posts and provide links to any other reports from here. First of all a video which was shown or referred to by at least 3 speakers: