flatlands and failures of curation

As a counterpoint to my last post on the rise of the verticals, I've been thinking about the importance of horizontal library collections. On the one hand if a library wants to make a difference in the web environment, they should develop unique vertical collections that focus in on particular subject areas and are of interest globally.

But what of the notion that libraries, particularly college libraries like my own, should provide their users with a strong general collection in line with their institution's curriculum? In the long tail, hybrid print/digital environment of the early 21rst century, this idea of a broad and shallow local collection perhaps doesn't make as much sense. As we try to expand our patron's information universe with consortial borrowing and large aggregations of e content, not to mention awareness of what's out there on the web, the idea of a limited general book collection seems quaint, like your neighborhood book store.

Somehow, we still want our patrons to be able to be able to identify the most important works in a subject area without getting overloaded with choices. One might argue that Google's success is based on doing something like this for the web as a whole. Google is able to reliably pull up the most popular and trusted websites on a given topic.

Our discovery systems need to do a better job of giving some relief to the information landscape. Our users should be able to tell if some titles are more popular, more widely cited, etc. than others. If a text is a classic work of literature or a classic in the field, it should be obvious s in search results.

Ranking search results based partly on the number of holding libraries like WorldCat.org does is a step in the right direction: the collective intelligence of collection development work, if you will. FRBRization is another one. Use of citation analysis could be another. Folksonomies and recommendation engines another. Human curation also has a role.

The commercial world is getting good at using these techniques. Libraries really have a chance to lead in the FRBRizaton arena, I think. This is something the commercial world hasn't figured out, as Mike Shatzkin points out out here:

Recommendation engines aside (”based on what you bought before, have we got a book for you!”), online book retailers have a long way to go to enable the customized curation that seems both possible and desireable in the digital age. Even as sophisticated a retailer at Barnes & Noble will present multiple duplicate entries of a public domain scan from Google to an ebook search for a Shakespeare play. And even as sophisticated a retailer as Amazon will sell you a Kindle ebook that is a self-published tome in a way that is indistinguishable from a book from a legitimate publisher. These are failures of curation.

the rise of the verticals

Mike Shatzkin, a commentator on the book publishing industry, makes the following observation:

Horizontal aggregation was more efficient in a world of physical delivery. Vertical aggregation makes more sense in a world of digital delivery. And enabling the customer or user to have some control over the curation is possible in the digital world but hardly is in the physical.

Shatzkin sees the future information ecosystem trending towards niches or 'verticals' with global audiences.

He is contrasting this model with traditional bookstores and trade publishers that cover a wide range of subjects. It also seems the opposite of the way that a traditional academic or public library is setup with books spanning a wide range of subjects and positioned to serve a local audience.

old=local and horizontal
new=global and vertical

I would argue that in the academic repository arena, we can already observe the difference between these two approaches.

Institutional repositories aggregate scholarship that crosses a wide range of subject areas only tied together by affiliation with a single academic institution. They might be described as local and horizontal.

Disciplinary repositories like the Social Science Research Network and arxiv.org concentrate content in certain academic disciplines. They might be described and global and vertical.

Which model is more successful, the disciplinary repositories or the institutional ones? If this ranking is right, it is the disciplinary repositories. They have the most momentum and interest behind them.

Generally, I think that digital initiatives in libraries will be most successful if they are able to build on a vertical community. Projects that are too wide in scope end up being about nothing.

funding models for digital projects

Thanks to Liberal Education Today for the reference to an Ithaka report called "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today." We've been having discussions on how to sustain our comparatively tiny accessCeramics digital project and came up with a similar list of options offered in this report, including: subscription, licensing to publishers and users, custom services, corporate sponsorship, author fees, endowment, and grants. Not surprisingly, it doesn't have any easy answer regarding which one is best.

The report is very critical about relying too much on what can be the invisible support of parent institutions.

To some extent, I think one just has to accept that these kind of projects can be somewhat transitory in nature. The report appears to be reaching for some kind of formula for permanent sustainability. But, indeed, if a project has a viable life for a decade and then its content migrates along to a new home, all is well.

The Symposium on Teaching with Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts in May at Reed College had a few cases of small scale digital projects at liberal arts colleges. In most cases, they revolved around supporting a research and teaching interest of a particular faculty member. The product would be used in instruction at a local institution, but at the same time had a global reach. Lafayette College's image collection of Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, co curated by a historian at the school and the library's special collections unit was one example. Claremont had several others. In these kinds of cases the institution is really supporting the work as part of faculty teaching and research and the library is acting as a kind of institutionally-sponsored laboratory.

I wonder if there are system-wide solutions that could make it easier for small scale digital projects to create revenue streams. Should digital collections software like ContentDM make it possible to sell high quality images, for example? Should it facilitate donations or sponsorship of collections?

OCLC now offers the ability to post local digital collections into WorldCat. But what if a library wants to license out some of its digitized content? A player like OCLC could develop pools of topically oriented, "premium" digital content from member libraries and charge for it. I have to believe that libraries will strive to keep their digital projects open and free.

The reality is that we get a lot of information on the open web for free now. But what incentive is there to pay that back by contributing something ourselves?

Springtime in Ohio

OCLC has had some interesting announcements over the last few weeks regarding the WorldCat platform. Their new partnership with Ebsco will really enrich WorldCat Local as an article discovery tool and bring it closer to being a kind of Google for libraries. It'll be interesting to see how much full text content they index vs. citation level indexing. This could be a huge step forward in the search fragmentation problem that federated searching has been trying to solve for a long time.

Andrew Pace commented recently in his blog on the spring weather in Ohio. Perhaps the warmer temperatures have those folks in Dublin thinking that they are in Northern California, looking out at the golden rolling hills around Silicon Valley rather than the verdant hills of central Ohio. His next post announces OCLC's plans to give away WorldCat Local for free (sort of)! Do these folks think they are running a Web 2.0 start-up company or what?

The bigger announcement was that OCLC is entering the ILS fray with a "web-scale" library management system. OCLC's description of the product makes the distinction between a SAAS model and what they are trying to achieve.

OCLC's vision is similar to Software as a Service (SaaS) but is distinguished by the cooperative "network effect" of all libraries using the same, shared hardware, services and data, rather than the alternative model of hosting hardware and software on behalf of individual libraries.

I think they are on the right track. The important idea here is that the OCLC community can aggregate library management data together and gain huge advantages. OCLC has holdings data and bibliographic data, which they have put to use effectively in WorldCat.org searching. Circulation data, e resource usage data, license data, etc. could bring major improvements in workflow and business intelligence.

The point that people miss here is that this endeavor is not about competing against other library management systems. It's about making libraries relevant in the broader, Google- centered information ecosystem. There are big problems with the way libraries work currently when viewed from the perspective of the modern day web:

• resource fragmentation-we have too many silos of data for searching; people want the kind of big indexes that Google provide
  
• the finite collection-if people want to read any article or a book, they should be able to click to it and have it appear; there is an expectation of this on the web, in the blogosphere, etc.; waiting a day for an article that is already digitized somewhere to be scanned and sent over ILL is too long; libraries are still tied to this notion that they provide their patrons access to a finite physical and licensed collection
  
• walled garden effect-often you have to be going through the library's web gateway to benefit from its resources
• Web/library sector content divide-our systems are often only aware of information resources within the products we provide--there is a disconect with the broader web that tools like Google Scholar bridge
  
• local value-what kind of local customization are libraries providing regarding information resources? I think often we fall short in providing enough added value to justify our existence as middlemen

If we don't solve some of these, we may lose our position as information provider/mediator to our communities.

Beyond making existing processes more efficient, the network level ILS should be an agent of change for the way that libraries purchase, license, and provide information. Its infrastructure and data should support more sophisticated arrangements with content providers (I think the aforementioned Ebsco arrangement demonstrates this).

In Karen Coyle's article on this initiative, she points out the connection between this project and some of the findings of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control:

A report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-ontherecord-jan08-final.pdf) noted that libraries spend a great deal of time on repetitive tasks, such as cataloging best-sellers, while ignoring the most valuable aspects of their collections: the archives, the rare items, the unique collections. The report urged libraries to "transfer effort into higher value activity" and separately called for libraries to embrace the web as the primary technology infrastructure.

The web scale library management system should provide the tools for libraries to do this higher value work, including synthesizing and specializing resources for a local environment.

Furthermore, rather than competing with other library sector technology vendors, OCLC should build the infrastructure that allows those vendors to build services on top of the WorldCat platform in the same way that Flickr works with partner companies who add value to their services. I know this is a tricky process, but it probably starts with open APIs.

future scenarios for the college library

I'm giving a talk on cloud computing at a library/IT conference sponsored by NITLE in next week at Centre College, located in Danville, KY, the heart of Kentucky Bluegrass country.

One of the things I'd like to discuss is possible futures for college library and IT departments given current trends in cloud computing and digital technology more broadly. Guess this ties back to that "core vs. context" session at the NITLE Summit. My idea is to present two visions of the future: a "dark" future and a "bright" future, the dark one making the case that libraries and IT department will basically shrink in size and importance, the bright one supporting the idea that their role will in fact strengthen in importance and influence.

A college library in 2020, the dark scenario:

In this case, libraries play a much less important role in bringing people and information together. Electronic access to book and journal content through open access academic publishing models combined with new models for purchasing content on an on-demand, per individual basis have removed the library as intermediary. Because the network allows it, smaller actors with specific needs now purchase, license, and manage content in more focused ways. Faculty license access to research databases for specific courses and maintain their own mini digital libraries in the cloud. Students purchase e-content on their own as they do their research, similar to the way they buy textbooks.

The library still exists as a rump organization. Physically it serves as a somewhat charming study hall. Much space formally devoted to books has been cannibalized by various other interests on campus. The library still provides a few general purpose electronic research tools to the community as a whole, doles out micro-credits to purchase electronic content and maintaining a small collection of print materials for those disciplines still interested in the physical book. The reduced physical and electronic collections and correspondingly low usage statistics have led to smaller staffs in all library departments supporting the discovery-to-delivery chain: acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, systems, circulation, and ILL.

With more sophisticated search systems, finding basic academic articles and books on a topic has gotten easier and this has undermined the role of reference/instruction librarians. Students still need help with research, but because librarians no longer manage the most important research sources, their tacit authority in this area has waned. Students turn to other figures on campus for research help such as the faculty, more senior level undergrads, graduate students, etc.

Compared to other library departments, special collections has fared rather well, maintaining their existing staffing levels. The digital environment has amplified the impact of their work, making it visible to a wider audience and because it is of a unique nature, it faces little competition from the network. Nevertheless, their ability to grow is hampered because they are disconnected somewhat from the teaching mission of the institution. Efforts offer digital archiving services for various constituencies have fallen flat as most campus departments prefer self management of digital archives in the cloud.

A college library in 2020, the bright scenario:

In this case, the role of the library as information provider and mediator stays strong and even grows.

The library still maintains its role as purchaser and provider of information for its institution for several reasons. The marketplace for academic information products remains complex, with many different commercial and non-profit providers, a wide range of formats, both physical and virtual (many of which we've never heard of right now), knotty copyright restrictions, a wide range of purchasing and licensing options. The library is needed to manage this complexity. This environment is also ever changing and consequently the library has a particularly important role in providing access over time to information in out-of-date format.

Furthermore, there is continued consensus on the value of giving students in an institution a bundle of information sources in which they can explore freely without incremental cost. Finally, a general inertia in academia, and the publishing and library worlds prevents too much change in they way academic information is bought and sold. The libraries love their budgets too much, and so do the publishers, and the symbolic value of the library prevents most schools from being too ruthless with budget cuts.

For these reasons, staffing in the entire discovery-to-delivery chain has remained fairly strong, though the roles have shifted somewhat from lower-paid physical processing positions to somewhat fewer higher paid, higher skill digital content management positions. Circulation and traditional acquisitions and book processing work have fallen off with less printed content being purchased. ILL has become mostly irrelevant but for esoteric items, as economical digital purchasing/delivery of per-item content has taken over.

Collection development has shifted away from picking individual books to purchasing and licensing aggregated sets, and the management of these sets is done using a globally connected integrated library systems, where much of the management data is already populated. Managing (or synthesizing) this content requires strong analytical skills and the positions in charge of this work are fewer than the old paper acquisitions/serials management jobs but pay more and require more knowledge and skills. The systems work required to specialize and mobilize this content for the college lightens as it shifts to the network level.

As digitally formatted information becomes more of the norm, the outside demand for expertise in older printed and digital information formats unexpectedly grows and some librarians specialize in this kind of expertise. For instance, there is now a "printed materials" librarian specializing in book preservation and the nuances of the traditional codex. This person works in special collections and the main collection, which more and more is about book as art and artifact rather than book as just information delivery device.

Because of the very complex information environment, the demand for reference and instruction increases. As scholarship and scholarly communications evolves in the digital environment, navigating it becomes ever more complex. Expectations for what constitutes a college research project increase, with faculty demanding more than the traditional 10 typewritten page paper. Some of these increasing expectations could include: the increased use of images, multimedia, sophisticated manipulation of statistics, mining digital archives, and actually making the research a public contribution to a body of work. These increasing expectations correspond to the types of demands placed on students when they go to work in 21rst century organizations after graduation. Faculty, already overworked, are even more so in 2020, and they need to leverage the library and librarians to make these complex research projects happen.

The evolution of research, scholarship and teaching in the digital environment creates new opportunities for what would have been cataloging and systems personnel in the old library. Faculty together with their students are creating organic niche digital collections of knowledge that they build on over time. Digital initiatives librarians and metadata experts serve as consultants in the construction of these archives, which provide a Web 2.0 style participatory style of learning and advance knowledge in their own right.

The physical library, while perhaps relinquishing some of the space formerly occupied by physical books and journals, becomes ever more the congregating space for this type collaborative learning and scholarship, and can now incorporate an array of student support services. The library remains a sanctuary for individual study and learning but also a collaborative place.

Special collections enjoys ever more relevance in the long tail world, especially as it makes it case that it's presence on the network increases the institution's prestige globally. As the web matures and people began to miss material from earlier decades that is suddenly lost, digital archiving becomes a high priority and a role that the library can fill for the college. Some of the positions devoted to circulating and processing print materials are re purposed in this area.

Overall, the library plays a bigger, better role than ever on campus.

***************

Next up, the two scenarios for IT. And then a prescription to make the bright scenario happen. Actually, no, I'll be making the case that the library has some influence over which of these plays out but that much of it is out of our control.

Ed Ayers on Digital Scholarship

One of the more enjoyable parts of the NITLE Summit was the final keynote by Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond. Ayers is a historian previously at U Va and is one of the people behind the much vaunted Valley of the Shadow project.

The main theses of his presentation was that collaborative digital scholarship that engages students can broaden the horizons of students at smaller institutions while at the same time providing a tighter sense of community and connectedness for students at larger institutions. The History Engine, which lets students/scholars contribute to a crowdsourced collection of historical episodes drawn from primary sources, was his prime example of this type of digital scholarship.

When Ayers came to Richmond, one of the things he asked for was a Digital Scholarship Lab, which has done The History Engine and a few other projects.

Ayers spoke of a missed opportunity by the academy to really embrace the revolution in networked technology. In his view, digital technology can be trans formative to humanities scholarship, not just teaching.

I was encouraged by the talk, especially to have someone at the highest level of liberal arts college leadership encouraging the types of digital projects that we're trying to foster here at Watzek. He said that when college presidents get together and eat rubber chicken these are the kinds of things they like to show off to each other. What an endorsement!

In my mind, The History Engine falls into a category of project in which you have undergraduate students doing research and contributing publicly to an evolving body of knowledge. Ayers thought that students learn better when they know that their work is public and making an original contribution to a body of knowledge.

I can think of a few projects like that around here, chief among which would be our situated research initiative in Environmental Studies. We've also had interest from our SoAn folks in building a digital library of senior project bibliographies. Many of the science labs on campus accumulate data over the years through student research projects, too.

Should academic libraries develop competencies in building these collaboratively created digital knowledgebases? Will this kind of project be an aspect of future library expertise and service? If the library has been the laboratory for humanists to date, are these a future version of that laboratory?

thinking more about OneBoxing WorldCat Local

I just checked with our implementation guy at OCLC about including some code in the header of our WorldCat Local instance that would allow us to add customized widgets into WorldCat Local search result screens. Sounds like it's a no go for now. WorldCat Local has a refreshingly simple branding customization options compared to what we're used to with Innovative's OPAC. But that simplicity will keep us from inserting some magic Javascript to achieve the OneBox effect.

I'm not sure if I was clear enough about what I'm interested in. Another way of looking at this is analagous to Google Ads. Google has established that placing context sensitive ads alongside search engine results is an effective way to drive traffic to advertiser websites.

If WorldCat Local becomes our library's search engine, shouldn't our library be able to put context sensitive "ads" next to results? These "ads" (or OneBoxes) would appear based on the search term and offer things like:

• links to library created research guides that seem relevant to search at hand
  
• links to course reserves if a prof's name is searched
• results from a site search of our library's site
• image results from ARTstor (ala Google images)
  
• results (if any) from the library's digital collections

To offer something like this, OCLC wouldn't need to do anything unprecedented. Lots of web applications (including this one I'm using right now, Blogger) allow you to embed bits of HTML. Javascript widgets inside OPACs have been around for awhile too, a prime example being LibraryThing for Libraries. If OCLC put the search results data into some nicely formated JSON and allowed Javascript to be inserted in various places, it wouldn't be hard for libraries or third parties to build these little things.

The WorldCat API is nice and all, but who (besides Terry Reese) wants to build an entire interface from scratch using it?

Click on the image above for an illustration of the WorldCat Local OneBox concept.

OneBoxes for WorldCat Local

In thinking through the options for placing the searchbox for WorldCat Local on our website, I'm inclined to argue for a single search box on the homepage rather than the somewhat confusing tabbed box that we have now. After all, WCL should get us to our "catalog" content, journal titles, and provide a general article search.


The problem with offering a single search box to patrons is that we miss content that they might want from a library site search: links to research database, course reserves, library hours, librarian contact info, etc.

WorldCat Local might be improved if it had the option to integrate Google style "OneBoxes" in its results display. A little box off to the side might highlight items like course reserves or matches from a site search.

I have a feeling, I'll probably lose the argument regarding a single search box on our website. After all, even Google offers users multiple silos of content to search (Books, Web, Blogs, News, etc.).

the evolution of library discovery environments in the web era

I'm working on an article for OLA Quarterly now about the evolution of library "discovery environments" during the web era. Maybe I'm getting a little too theoretical here, but I'm trying to come up with three distinct phases of evolution. Roughly, they are:

1. Bringing pre-web indexing systems onto the web platform (mid-to late 90s)
2. Systems that increasingly 1.) match the consumer web experience on the wider web and 2) manage (synthesize) online full text content, in both with an increasingly dis-integrated set of tools (early to mid 2000s)
3. Two-way network level systems that benefit from both global scale and local customization (specialize), systems that get better as more people (library staff and patrons) use them. Systems that syndicate (mobilize) resources (late 2000s)

The first phase is sort of Web .5. The second phase involves trying to catch up to Web 1.0. The third phase is Web 2.0 and beyond.

1. Web OPACs, static library websites, A&I databases on the web
2. JSTOR, Serials Solutions, SFX, ContentDM, DSpace, lipstick-on-a-pig library catalogs, Endeca, federated search.
3. Google Scholar, Google Books, WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local, Flickr Commons

I realize that trying to write history as it's happening is hazardous.

Using the WorldCat API in link resolving for books

The new WorldCat Navigator-based Summit Catalog just went live on Monday.

One of the connectors that we needed to update at Watzek was our link resolver. Upon receiving a citation for a book, the resolver used to do some screen scraping of the INNREACH-based Summit catalog to figure out whether the book was available at our local library and/or within the Summit consortium. This feature is also built into our ILL requesting system so that patrons don't ILL request books in Summit.

Now that Summit is on WorldCat, the logical move was to use the WorldCat API to check if a book is in our local catalog or in Summit and provide links accordingly. The API lets you throw an ISBN at it and optionally returns the OCLC numbers of holding libraries near you. By simply doing an array_intersect in PHP with a list of the Summit libraries' OCLC symbols:

array ("Chemeketa"=>"CHK","Clark"=>"CCV","COCC"=>"CEO","Concordia"=>"CCD","Central Wash"=>"CWU","Eastern OU"=>"EOS","Eastern WU"=>"WEA", "George Fox"=>"GFC", "George Fox Portland"=>"WEV", "LCC"=>"OLE","Lewis & Clark"=>"OLP","Lewis & Clark Law"=>"ONS","Linfield"=>"OLC", "Linfield Portland"=>"OLL", "Marylhurst"=>"MRY","Mt Hood CC"=>"MHD","OHSU"=>"OGE","OHSU"=>"OGI","OHSU"=>"OQH","OIT"=>"OIT","Oregon State"=>"ORE","Oregon State"=>"OR1","Pacific U"=>"OPU", "PCC"=>"OQP","PCC"=>"OQY","PSU"=>"ORZ","Reed"=>"ORC","SMU"=>"WSL","Souther Oregon U"=>"SOS","Seattle Pacific"=>"OXF","Seattle U"=>"WSE", "Seattle U"=>"W9L","TESC"=>"ESR","U of Oregon"=>"ORU","U of Oregon"=>"UOL", "U of Portland"=>"OUP", "U of Puget Sound"=>"UPP","U of Wash"=>"WAU","U of Wash Law"=>"ONA", "Willamette U"=>"OXG", "Warner P"=>"OWP", "Western Ore U"=>"WOS","Whitman"=>"HTM");

it's easy to figure out if the book is held in Summit and/or in our library.

If you don't have an ISBN, the SRW features of the API allow one to do author/title search. If an author/title search results in just one match, it's easy to check if Summit holds the book. If there is more than one match, I just left it for the user to check the catalogs themselves, but there are other approaches that one could take.

Link resolvers seem to be used most often for articles, but research databases like Philosopher's Index have lots of books in them. Here's an example. Lots of people put books in RefWorks, which offers OpenURL linking out. Often, these citations (some examples) have no ISBNs and are often a little funky. Hence, the resolver can have problems with them. Here's an example of a book citation from RefWorks.

design matters

I want to echo Dan Cohen's belief that "design matters" not only in digital humanities, but also in academic library websites.

Academic libraries, even small ones, need to meet user expectations for good design in their websites and digital collections. They need to get beyond the do-it-yourself HTML mentality of the early web. The also need to do something more than tap into a parent institution's content management system if they want their website to be an optimal research gateway and marketing tool.

When possible, libraries should get staff members on board with design expertise. They should learn to how to contract out for design services when needed. When set aside the thousands of dollars that a small academic library typically spends each year on licensed e resources, a couple thousand every few years for web design of the portal to those resources provides a lot of bang for the buck.

We're working with some professional web designers on accessCeramics right now, and I'm looking forward to learning from the experience.

on ARTstor, MDID and moving to the network level in visual resources

ARTstor just released a new interface--probably in beta. I think it does away with the Java in favor of modern AJAX techniques, a good move. ARTstor and, more generally, the provision of images of art and cultural objects to academic populations is a good example of how things are moving to the network level.

Visual Resources is one of my areas of responsibility here at Watzek, and its interesting how much faster things are moving in this area than in "mainstream" library collections. The continued viability of the monograph has kept the pace of going digital relatively moderate in library stacks.

With our College slide collection, however, we've seen our users (mainly Art faculty) almost totally abandon slides over the course of five years. It would be quite a shocker if library stacks fell into disuse at that pace especially because there is so much organizational and physical infrastructure surrounding them.

When Margo, the Visual Resources Curator, and I approached the problem of "going digital" in visual resources back four years ago, the route we choose was to build an institutional collection of digital images using MDID. The images would be a combination of images scanned for faculty and purchased high quality digital images. MDID software is designed to provide a comprehensive environment for teaching with digital images. It stores an institutional collection of digital images, has a space for personal images, and a suite of presentation tools geared towards teaching Art or Art History. Our vision was that MDID would be the central place to find and work with digital images for teaching.

Though MDID@LC has grown and faculty use it to find high quality stuff, things haven't quite turned out as intended. Faculty, especially the ones that are confident technologically, have their own tools that they know and like to use for presentation, chief among them, Powerpoint. They also like to maintain their own collections of images on their own computers. (It would be nice to nudge them along to networked software for their personal images like Flickr, but that's another topic).

Except for the faculty that follow our guidance directly (those that tend to be the least confident technologically) most folks don't use MDID to present. It's just another silo that they check when they are looking for images, along with ARTstor and the web. This is leading us to the conclusion that in the interest of breaking down silos, we should mount all of our institution specific images in ARTstor.

Fortunately, ARTstor offers a hosted collection feature which does just that, albeit with a few limitations. In the past, when libraries purchased collections of digital images, they had to host them themselves in their own digital asset management systems. Now, when we want to license a set of images from a company like Archivision, they just "flip a switch" and the collection shows up in our ARTstor account. We can also upload our own collection of images into ARTstor at certain intervals (which will need to be increased to really use ARTstor to provide our image services to faculty).

ARTstor is a great example of the advantages of "moving to the network level." It's platform that's being continually improved and a collection of resources that's being constantly expanded. One of the cool things about it is that it groups together different images of the same work of art--sort of a FRBRization of images.

Our experience with both ARTstor and MDID really shows that building isolated, institution focused collections just doesn't make sense. In this networked world, our local assets need to co-mingle with those on the network and become part of that greater whole. I suppose this is also the idea with the WorldCat.org platform and its various permutations. To invest heavily in our local library catalog database and its search platform bears some similarity to investing in MDID.

Now, I'm not saying ARTstor couldn't go further. I've always thought that they should "mobilize" their content by syndicating thumbnails of their content in search engines. And then there's the matter of the academic Flickr.

reclaiming the OPAC real estate

Here at Watzek Library, we've been working on a project that might be called a "mashup" of our library catalog and regional union catalog, Summit. We're slowly releasing it to the public to get feedback and to see how well the technology holds up (see previous two links).

Basically, we're using JQuery and JSON to add some little widgets to the full bibliographic record displays of these Innovative Interfaces OPACs. This is a tricky process as control over the HTML output by an III OPAC is highly locked down by Innovative. By using javascript to go out and get value added data and insert it into the records, we're doing something fairly similar to the LibraryThing for Libraries widget, discussed here in panlibus.

Technology-wise, most of the heavy lifting is done by the JQuery javascript library as well as the JSON for JQuery library, which we use to employ the common technique of moving data across domains using JSON.

The services that we've added so far to the open beta of the catalogs include:

• Amazon images
• Link to RefWorks export
• Link to Google Book Search record and a search box if it is searchable
• Direct link to search for book reviews in one of our general research databases
  

Note: we're using the technique described by John Blyberg to do our link to Google Book Search. We haven't yet been shut off by Google, but our volume isn't that high.

In our alpha version of the catalog, we've also implemented wikipedia link for the author, Google map of holding libraries, and similar items driven by Amazon web services.

The goal here is to hook are users up to valuable related services and linkages that they might not otherwise find.

Google Book Search Local

So here's an idea...

The Google AJAX search API makes it pretty darn easy to create a customized Google Book Search for your own web page. The API will return an identifier (which is typically an ISBN) for the book, among other metadata in results lists. Why not use a little JSON and JQuery to figure out whether or not your library holds the item and insert that information w/ link in the results? A database of your library and/or union catalog holdings would facilitate the task.

This would create a nicely localized version of Book Search for your library.

Mossberg on centralized IT

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that the Wall St. Journal's technology columnist Walter Mossberg had this to say about centralized IT departments:

...he began his speech by calling the information-technology departments of large organizations, including colleges, "the most regressive and poisonous force in technology today."

They make decisions based on keeping technology centralized, he said. Although lesser-known software may be better, he said, technology departments are likely to use big-name products for their own convenience. That may keep costs down for an organization, he said. But it puts consistency above customization, preventing individuals from exploring what technology products are best suited to their own needs.

And change is coming, he said, whether IT departments can keep up or not.

This was part of a speech that also emphasized the declining importance of the personal computer.

tweaking Google search

NYT has a nice piece that goes inside Google's 'inner sanctum': the search quality department. It gives you some illustration of how worked-through search is in Google, and how far ahead of the competition that they are.

At one point, they discuss the impressions of a recent recruit from Amazon to the department:

When he arrived and began to look inside the company’s black boxes, he says, he was surprised that Google’s methods were so far ahead of those of academic researchers and corporate rivals.

“I spent the first three months saying, ‘I have an idea,’ ” he recalls. “And they’d say, ‘We’ve thought of that and it’s already in there,’ or ‘It doesn’t work.’ ”

I think the best thing that we can do in academic libraries is try to co-opt this technology for our more focused purposes. I hope Google can keep their systems open enough for us to do this.

One small way we're thinking about doing this is including Google Book Search results on our OPAC search results page using their AJAX search API. Here's hoping that they soon add Scholar support for the search API.

NITLE

I've learned a great deal about NITLE recently, as I'm going to be the new campus liaison for L&C.

Interestingly, NITLE is an "incubated" organization by a larger nonprofit known as ITHAKA. ITHAKA is behind projects such as ARTstor and JSTOR.

The chief benefit of NITLE, in my mind, is that it allows cooperative technology work among institutions with similar missions (liberal arts college). Even though our regional cooperatives (like Orbis Cascade Alliance) work superbly in many instances where geography is key (physical resource sharing), I think it can make more sense to collaborate based on mission on these more content and teaching-and-learning focused initiatives.

I particularly like the discipline focused programs that NITLE offers: Al-Musharaka (Middle Eastern Studies), Sunoikisis (Classics), foreign languages, and a couple digital collections: IDEAS and REALIA. The organization also has its fingers in many other pies. These programs, plus quite a few others, reflect a pretty creative, innovative group.

flickr at the organizational level

We're attempting to build an organizational collection of images for teaching around here using MDID, which is great open source web-based software for teaching with digital images. It's got lots of features tuned to teaching the images in the classroom, many of which center around its presentation tool which allows for zooming and side by side display of high res images.

It's got two major flaws, as I see it:

• It's a silo of data. Folks looking for images don't go to it first when they're looking for something.
• The UI on it for organizing images isn't nearly as nice as Flickr. I realize this as I use Flickr more and more for my personal stuff. Though MDID has a personal collection feature, there's no way I'd recommend it over Flickr.
  

It would be great if Flickr offered some kind of organizational account that facilitated organizations building image collections within it. Or perhaps we need to make MDID work with Flickr. MDID could drop all the functionality that Flickr does better and just concentrate on the education specific features.

why code4lib?

Despite the fact I'm kind of burnt out on writing code, I find code4lib to be one of the most invigorating conferences I've attended in the last few years. Why? I think it's because it's where the new opportunities in the broader web world meet the digital library world.

Some interesting ideas that have come up this year:

• the SOLR platform for indexing and faceting a library catalog or a digital library of anything really, XML based
  
• The Talis platform's concept of data "stores": large bodies of xml data that can be queried and related to data in other stores in an unlimited number of ways using "web scale" infrastructure
• the idea of hooking up openurl resolver type services as a microformat
• using del.icio.us as a content management system for library subject guides
• a subject recommendation engine based on crawling intellectual data associated with university departments
• using a protocol like zeroconf so that library patrons can auto-discover library services upon entering the physical library space

It seems like most of the big players here work in larger universities or organizations that have large local data sets to work with in the form of institutional repositories or digital collections. There's a lot of concern about building large, searchable digital libraries . This is fine if you have control over a large body of data. I can tell you that in the small college library environment, most of the data we work with is generic data about books and journal articles that is living in some database that is out of our control. We're often only able to add value to that data once it's arrived in a user's search results, through an OpenURL resolver or perhaps a tweak to our catalog.

This is not to say that the what the big players are doing isn't useful or interesting to us. It's just different and makes me wish we had more opportunities to creatively manipulate the digital content to which we provide our patrons access.

bib-app

A team at my old place of employment, Wendt Library at UW-Madison, showed off a pretty cool application, bibapp, that gathers data about what faculty on their campus have published. Among other things, the data is used to find articles that our legally storable in the IR; almost cooler than that is the connections that they demonstrate between the publications. They can visualize who's publishing with who, analyze popular research subjects across discplines, etc.