According to Robin Murray, libraries are transitioning from an acquire-catalog-circulate model to one that could be described as synthesize-specialize-mobilize. Discuss.
This is great news and a truly bold move for the consortium considering how comfortable it has been using Innovative Interface's INNREACH product. Indeed, INNREACH, has served the Alliance well over the years.
The replacement product might sound a bit confusing: "a consortial borrowing solution based on the integration of WorldCat.org, VDX, WorldCat Resource Sharing and a new circulation gateway. " Here's a primer
WorldCat.org is the search interface and global bibliographic database and can be scoped into group (union) and Local catalogs; the Alliance will be creating a group catalog that will act like a union catalog for its member's holdings, but some members may opt to buy WorldCat Local.
VDX is a product that handles materials workflow between libraries
The "circulation gateway" is a yet-to-be developed product by OCLC that will connect VDX to the circulation systems of various ILSs, in our case III
Someone once remarked to me that the liberal arts colleges are a "boutique industry."
I've often thought that the success of liberal arts colleges in the early 21rst century has certain parallels with other successful industries where quality is prized over quantity. We have these kinds of industries all over Oregon, especially in Portland, and they are thriving. Hand-built bicycles, craft brewed beer, good coffee, even locally developed paint (I'm taking a break from using some Yolo paint right now).
David Brooks makes fun of the success of these types of businesses in Bobos in Paradise. The way he describes them is: they find a way to make something that used to be a kind of commodity item, a part of normal, everyday life, like coffee (which used to cost 5 cents and tasted about the same everywhere) and make it really fancy and expensive.
The article today in the NYT about fancy food at college campuses, I think, reinforces the tie between these pleasure, comfort and health-oriented boutique industries and that more lofty industry that is liberal arts higher education.
It's great that we're seeing better food on College campuses, especially for me since my campus is far away from all the good restaurants in Portland. But the fact that colleges can afford to cater to this kind of desire really reflects big endowments and big tuition (paid by people with big incomes). It's a sign that liberal arts education is just as much about a "lifestyle" as it is about learning, personal growth, etc.
When I was in school at University of Wisconsin in Madison, I shopped at Woodmans, and drank a lot of Leinenkugels, which was just $7.50 a case in 1989. I can barely pick up a six pack of Full Sail for that much anymore.
While waiting for paint to dry (literally) at 2 am, came across this.
At code4lib, we heard from Terry Reese and Emily Lynema about the DLF's initiative to create standards interfaces for ILSs to support external discovery services. An announcement from Peter Brantley confirms that a basic set of these has been adopted under the title "ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces: A proposal for the ILS community."
The proposal's goals are modest, but nonetheless set a baseline of functionality that most ILS vendors should be able to provide without a whole lot of difficulty:
1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.
2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.
3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.
The proposal is undersigned by the following vendors:
Talis
Ex Libris
LibLime
BiblioCommons
SirsiDynix
Polaris Library Systems
VTLS
California Digital Library
OCLC
AquaBrowser
Abstention:
Innovative Interfaces, Inc.
Innovative Interfaces is clearly making a bold statement here by not going along with the crowd. Not sure what it is, though.
Lately, I've been thinking about how the cloud computing model of providing software intersects with the open source model.
We've all gotten pretty comfortable with supporting Open Source apps that utilize a LAMP stack, Wordpress being a good case in point. This model works very well, generally speaking, but there are a couple problems with it, from the perspective of cloud computing.
First of all, if you use something like Wordpress, you regularly need to update your code and you need to deal with various compatibilities as you migrate systems. I really like applications that just kind of upgrade themselves over time, like GMail.
Second, applications that are installed as single instances on multiple servers can't leverage Web 2.0 style network effects like single installation, web scale applications can (eg Flickr, YouTube, WorldCat.org (what, did, I just call an OCLC product Web 2.o?), etc.).
The recently released Omeka product got a lot of things right, I think. It's really a Web 2.0 digital collections system that allows for TWO-WAY interactions with collections.
We're eager to try it out here at Lewis & Clark. To get it up and running on our server, I had to upgrade MySQL from 4 to 5. This broke our compiled version of PHP. A newly downloaded version of PHP fixed things, but that broke a couple other components on our web site. A few hours later, all was well, but the point is, loading and running something like Omeka does still require some "heavy lifting" on a sysadmin's part.
The other element lacking in Omeka is the fact that its data isn't part of a larger system. Sure it's harvestable and can be syndicated through RSS, but it's not part of a greater, two-way information ecosystem.
So how should Open Source projects be done in this cloud computing environment? Code should be shared and improved by a community and those improvements should be tested and then applied to a centralized running instance of the application.
Google has just released a platform that would work well for this sort of model, called "Google App Engine."
Mike Wesch of "The Machine is Us/using Us" fame, gave a great talk at the NITLE Summit on the ways he believes digital technology changes learning. A major point was that the "sage on the stage" lecture model just doesn't make sense anymore. Knowledge is no longer scarce--the professor no longer has the kind of authority that they used to.
Not sure how much I buy the part about lack of authority. There were always ways to challenge a professor's authority in the past. To do so is still hard. To challenge a professor's knowledge and authority, you need much more than just information--you need knowledge and understanding of that information, and digital technology doesn't endow students with that. And the professor still sets the agenda for a course and hands out the grade. But the point about the lecture as a somewhat outmoded vehicle for instruction in higher ed is well taken.
On a more practical level, one thing that was striking about this guy was that he cobbles together his own learning management system out of freely available, open Web 2.0 tools: Zoho databases, WetPaint wikis, YouTube, Netvibes, etc. Bryan Alexander, in his intro to Wesch, referred to him as a "faculty member from the future." One might say that he represents the beginning of a third stage in the evolution of teaching technology:
from individually managed, desktop teaching tools like Word, Powerpoint that confine information to the teacher's personal information space and rely on the lecture to get that information across
to institutionally managed, server based tools like Moodle, WebCT, BlackBoard that can serve to share and discuss information within a particular course or institution
to systems that are managed at the network level and in some cases (like Wikipedia) serve to share knowledge globally
When someone in the room, which was full of educational technologists, among others, asked, "what can we do to help faculty like you", Mike's memorable quote was: "Get out of my way!"
Lorcan Dempsey has just posted some thoughts on Carr's The Big Switch. I like this quote:
The 'big switch' is going to be a major issue for libraries over the next few years. They spend too much time getting their systems to work, and not enough time putting them to work.
Meanwhile, I must confess that I have yet to read The Big Switch, just excerpts from it on the web. I've put a hold on our library's copy of it (I think I know who has it checked out).
As OCLC re-invents itself from a staid bibliographic utility to a company that can provide "next generation" library services, it's funny how that old fashioned term "utility" takes on a new meaning.
I was at the Orbis Cascade Alliance Council meeting last week as the group was discussing the possiblity of a partnership with OCLC for a group catalog on the WorldCat.org platform. As I reflected on the consortium's potential move from an isolated, server based union catalog, to one that lives in the cloud I thought about how this decision parallels those that many organizations will be making in the next few years as they make what Nick Carr has dubbed, The Big Switch to utility style computing. OCLC likes to call this "moving to the network level," but I think it's also just as much a move to "cloud" or utility style computing.
I'd heard most of what the OCLC sales force had to say at the meeting before. But one thing that struck me was how they explained the point of worldcat.org. OCLC believes that libraries need a "presence" on the web like EBay, Amazon, or Google. And that presence needs to be two-way, meaning users interact with the site and their interaction improves it.
If WorldCat is able to become a real "presence", maybe more database vendors will be open to representing their content in it and it will become a federated search killer. Maybe libraries can have more control over the digital content they give their users vs. just sending them off to an external, commercial website.
Where does local customization and control play in this potential juggernaut? Hopefully OCLC will keep opening up their APIs, and let libraries still have the ability to customize their own records in various ways.
