Summon 'web scale'? I don't think so.

I think it's strange that Serials Solutions is attempting to apply the "web-scale" adjective to their Summon Service.

As far as I can tell, the library community has really co-opted this term from its original use, which pertained to computing infrastructure that could support web sites that handle huge amounts of traffic. Perhaps Lorcan Dempsey widened the use of the term in January 2007:

'Web-scale' refers to how major web presences architect systems and services to scale as use grows. But it also seems evocative in a broader way of the general attributes of the large gravitational hubs which are such a feature of the current web (eBay, Amazon, Google, WikiPedia, ...).

This reference to 'web scale' is now at the top of Google results for the term, making me think that the library community has just about taken over the term.

I attended a webinar on Summon yesterday, and found out that with Summon, Serials Solutions creates a broad index of content available to your library: books, journals, digital collections, etc. It gets the data from your library uploading data and from the e content vendors with which your library has relations. The data goes in a SOLR index, which then can serve as a comprehensive discovery tool for your library's content. Because it is built on local data and tailored for a particular user community this sounds much more like an 'intranet' type search than anything that is "web scale."

WorldCat Local with its upcoming metasearch features does something similar, but I think that it can make a more legitimate claim to the "web scale" designation because it is attached to the WorldCat.org database. In my opinion, WorldCat.org is web scale in the sense that it is used and improved by a global community.

Summon and WorldCat Local are competing in the same discovery interface space. On first glance, it appears that Serials Solutions is ahead of OCLC in the incorporation of article content, perhaps because of their close relations with content vendors. OCLC seems to have the edge in books: they are able to leverage holdings data in relevance rankings and they have a more sophisticated treatment of various editions of the same work (FRBR). OCLC is also endeavoring to provide delivery services in addition to discovery.

It will be interesting to see if OCLC can use its global database and the Web 2.0 principle "it gets better the more people use it" to differentiate its product from competitors like Summon.

I don't think its obvious, but what OCLC is trying to do with WorldCat is much bolder than Serials Solutions and Summon. With Summon, libraries are basically throwing all of their content into one index to break down the data silos within an institution. But what you end up with is a big search silo for that institution.

With WorldCat, the vision is to break down not only the silos within institutions but also the silos between institutions. And not just break down those silos in the sense of harvest-and-search. The concept is that libraries and their patrons will be working together to improve a shared database through intentional and professional metadata. This shared database will be big enough to have a real impact on the web. Its records will surface in search engine results. Its interface will be familiar to many, and it will be customizable for a particular audience via the WorldCat Local route.

We'll see if this grand vision takes hold.

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.

on e books

Our library is dipping its toes into e-books. It's a complex world. A small academic library has a few options for providing e books:

1. Public domain e books from Project Gutenberg, Google Books, etc.
2. Licensed packages of ebooks paid with a yearly fee
   
3. E book aggregators that sell books by the title, the big ones being EBrary and EBL

This is a good discussion of academic library options regarding e book purchasing.

I'm most comfortable with the licensing option because it doesn't seem like as long term of a commitment as paying full price or more to purchase permanent rights to individual titles on a potentially questionable platform. We recently licensed the ACLS Humanities e book collection and are trialing the Safari digital library and the EBrary platform.

Safari is a good example of providing e book content in a way that makes sense for the web. It is surprisingly pleasant to use. All book content is browse-able as HTML web pages and there are links between relevant sections of materials. Books may be downloaded via PDF and used on mobile devices. New titles in the library are available via RSS feed. It seems like the content used was designed from the ground up to be navigated digitally.

Ebrary presents itself as a clunky web interface plus a reader plug-in that lets you do various things to the book like cut and paste, notes, etc. Seems like sort of a "walled garden" approach. This doesn't strike me as very practical or realistic. It's unlikely that patrons are going to adopt research habits that take advantage of a subset of features only available on some electronic content. Ebrary books feel like old fashioned books shoe-horned into an electronic interface. EBrary has titles from many academic publishers that are availalbe to purchase at full price from library book vendors like Yankee and Blackwell.

The ACLS collection also has a somewhat clunky interface, but at least they are not pushing you to download a reader. It looks somewhat JSTOR inspired. Weirdly, you can download books in PDF format, but only in 5 page chunks. You can also see the plain text, but in a hard to read format.

The Google Books interface has a nice way of flipping between the scanned image and the plain text and is also generally pleasant to use considering it's working with mostly analog-derived content.

Unsurprisingly, the library sector vendors are behind the curve in user interface design. I don't think our patrons will have much sympathy for this.

I hope that we can eventually buy all our e books so that they may be used in a best-of-breed interface. I'm also hoping that we can leverage our regional consortium's buying power with e book packages and individual e books. Right now, purchasing an e book for our library is a bummer because it provides no broader benefit to the consortium collection. A shared e book collection is on the Orbis Cascade Alliance Strategic Agenda, I'm told.

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.

finding full text with Google Scholar

The Google Operating System Blog had a post the other day that alerted me to a relatively new feature in Google Scholar. For each article in a result set, Google Scholar will point you to a free, unrestricted copy of the article on the web (if available) with a little green ►.

With many academic journal publishers allowing authors to post copies of their articles on their personal websites, it is now common for scholarly articles in subscription journals to be available for free on the open web. Below is an example of an article, with a copy available from a website in an academic domain (sorry for the tiny image).


This is a good example of Google Scholar leveraging the Google web index to provide something you can't get within the research systems that libraries have built and licensed. It's also yet another reminder that libraries and publishers have lost their role as sole provider and intermediary for academic content.

I've pointed out previously in this blog that creators of research products for libraries do not (or are not able) to take advantage of web indexes as they create their products. I wonder if openurl resolver vendors or someone like OCLC could offer this feature by tapping into something like the Alexa Web Search service to mine the web for full copies of a given article? It might be hard to do on the fly with a resolver request.

I'm guessing that Google Scholar will have 90%+ of scholarly articles in existence in its index at the citation level in the not-to-distant future. It is able to mine so many places for citations: web sites, scanned books and journals, and many publishers' archives, etc.

As OCLC loads article citations into Open WorldCat, I wonder if they have considered a more "brute force" approach to finding citations. They could mine the web for them like Google. Of course, this would introduce all sorts of possibilities for errors and lack of bibliographic control. Google Scholar must have lots of errors in the citations it collects, but it seems to efficiently collate like citations together and recognize which citations are the most referenced.

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.

Google Universal Search as federated search approach

The Google Operating System blog offers some thoughts on Google's evolving approach to Universal Search (where they group results together from various Google indexes--Web, Books, Images, News, etc.). Even though Google has direct control over its various search 'silos', they are not trying to mix results together in Universal Search. Whether this is due to technical limitations, usability, or a combination of both, we can't be sure.

Trying to intermix and collectively rank results from a wide variety of search systems never seemed like a good approach to me, but that's just what many libraries have been attempting to do with federated searching. If Google can have its silos, why can't we have ours?

Maybe the Google approach reflects the utility of searching for the same type of media: news stories, web sites, images, products, etc. within the same search. Following on this logic, should we stick with the idea of keeping article searches separate from books in library search offerings?

Our library is thinking through these questions as we attempt to package our major search options into a search widget for our website.

Photosynth demo

This is a pretty amazing demo of a technology called "photosynth" that brings together photos of something by analyzing them.

Google Universal Search

Lorcan Dempsey points out that Google's just introduced a strategy to bring together results from many of their vertical search engines (books, images, web, video, etc.). It's called "universal search". This would have been a good thing to bring up at the presentation I did on federated searching at the Oregon Library Association conference. I was trying to make the case that search engines are really the future of federated searching, or at least worth looking at for important trends.

Unfortunately, they don't mention bringing Scholar on board universal search. I'm also wondering about the ability to integrate search appliance results with Google Search engine results. We're thinking of indexing some of our local content with an Appliance, and if we could mix results from the Appliance with Google Web and Scholar results, maybe we could put together something like federated searching with Google technology.

Giving WorldCat Local a Go

UW (not the great, Badger State UW, rather that lesser institution: the University of Washington) launched WorldCat Local today. I can't say that there are too many surprises to me in the implementation, as it is based on the now familiar WorldCat.org platform.

But a few observations:

I knew that they would be offering fairly direct requesting for items held in the Summit consortium. This works pretty well and, interestingly, even works for me as someone at Lewis & Clark. Even if I come across an item that is held at the UW libraries, I am offered the ability to request it on Summit.

One thing I don't really care for is the display of holding libraries closest to me that is shown when I've selected a book...this just seems irrelevant and confusing to me when I'm a member of the Summit network.

The relevance ranking seems to be based a great deal on how many libraries hold an item. This is definitely a good direction to go and could be likened to Google PageRank. But it doesn't always work well. When I searched for "Bend Oregon", for example, the top hit is an EPA publication: "Pressure and vacuum sewer demonstration project Bend, Oregon". I also got lots of references to government documents with the title: "Amending the Bend Pine Nursery Land Conveyance Act..."--it's held by like 189 libraries. (I think this offers some hint of the redundancy involved in acquiring and cataloging government documents across libraries when these types of documents are often rarely used and available openly on the web).

The book that "should" come to the top is probably "Bend, in Central Oregon", which is the main book ABOUT the city Bend, OR...WorldCat Local needs to work on that "aboutness" thing...not sure how. Perhaps they need to be doing more creative things with subject headings or somehow move govt. publications lower in the ranks. Or bring in circulation stats...those would quickly lower govt. docs in the rank.

Interestingly, WorldCat.org seems to have more sensible results when you search for "Bend Oregon"...perhaps they are using more of a public library relevance ranking system that doesn't report all those depository library holdings

Relevance ranking is not an easy thing to do, of course, and is much more than a popularity contest. It's funny how library holdings are a strange take on "popularity."

Another complaint: the facets for authors don't always work very well. Seems like corporate authors without much meaning ("United States") often float to the top. Also, it's hard to browse around the publication date facet.

I don't see many openings for mashups and remixability...no RSS feeds or apis advertised. I have hopes that OCLC will open things up.

The other question that's hard to answer is the degree of local configurability. Generally speaking, it's a pretty busy display when looking at a particular title, but it would be nice to think it could be configured locally and streamlined.

I applaud the inclusion of articles and hope this expands. Bringing on board large aggregations of articles could be great. Better resolver integration would be nice as more articles appear.

Overall, this is a pretty good first shot at an OPAC product by the behemoth OCLC.