This is a list of Top Tech Trends for the ALA Annual Meeting, Summer 2009.

Green computing

The amount of computing that gets done on our planet has a measurable carbon footprint, and many of us, myself included, do not know exactly how much heat our computers put off and how much energy they consume. With the help from some folks from the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing, I learned my laptop computer spikes at 30 watts on boot, slows down to 20 watts during normal use, idles at 2 watts during sleep, and zooms up to 34 watts when the screen saver kicks in. Just think how much energy and heat your computer consumes and generates while waiting for the nightly update from your systems department. But realistically, it is our servers that make the biggest impact, and while energy consumption is one way to be more green, another is to figure out ways to harness the heat the computers generate. One trend is to put computers in places that need to be heated up, like green houses in the winter. Another idea is to put them in places where cool air is exhausted, like building ventilation ducks. What can you do? Turn your computer off when it is not in use since the computer electronics and such are not as sensitive to power on, power off cycles as they used to be.

“Digital Humanities”

There seems to be a growing number of humanities scholars who understand that computers can be applied to their research. See the Digital Humanities Manifesto as an example. With the advent of all the electronic texts being made available, it is not possible to read each and every text individually. In an effort to analyze large copra more quickly, people can create word clouds against these documents to summarize them. They can extract the statistically significant words and phrases to determine their “aboutness”. They can easily compute Fog, Flesch, and Flesch-Kincaid scores denoting the complexity of documents. (“Remember, ‘Why Johnny can’t read’?”) These people understand that humanities scholarship is not necessarily done in isolation, and the codex is not necessarily the medium of the day. They understand the advantages of open access publishing. For our profession, it is difficult to overstate the number of opportunities this trend affords librarianship. Anybody can find information. What people need now are tools to make information easier to analyze and use.

Tweeting with Twitter

Microblogging (think Twitter) is definitely hot. In some situations it can be a really useful application of computer technology. Frankly, I think the fascination will wear off and its functionality will become similar to the use of cellphone photographs at news-breaking events. Tweet, tweet, tweet.

Discovery interfaces and mega-indexes

If I were to pick the hottest trend in library technology, it would be fledgling implementation of large, all-encompassing indexes of journal and book content — integrating mega-indexes into the “discovery” interface. This is exemplified by Serials Solutions’ Summa, hinted at by an OCLC/EBSCO collaboration, and thought about by other library vendors. Google Scholar comes close but could benefit by adding more complete bibliographic data of books. OAIster worked for OAI-accessible content but needed to be indexed with a less proprietary tool. The folks at Index Data created something similar and included additional content, but the idea never seemed to catch on. Federated (broadcast) search tried and has yet to fulfill the promise. The driver behind this idea is the knowledge that many data silos don’t meet the needs of our users. Instead people want one box, one button, and one data set. Combine journal bibliographic data with book bibliographic data into a single index (not database). Sort search results by relevance. Provide a set of time-saving services against the result. In order for this technological technique to work each data set must be normalized into a single data structure and indexed (probably with an open source indexer called Lucene). In other words, there will be a large set of core elements such a title, author, note, subject, etc. All bibliographic data from all sets will be mapped to these fields and what doesn’t fall neatly into any one of them will be mapped to free text fields. Not perfect, not 100 percent, but hugely functional, and it meets user’s expectations. To see how this can be done with the volumes and volumes of medically-related open access content see the good work done by OpenPHIand their HealthLibrarian.

Indexing with Solr/Lucene works well – Lucene seems to have become the gold standard when it comes to open source indexer/search engine platforms. Solr — a Web Services interface to Lucene — is increasingly the preferred way to read & write Lucene indexes. Librarians love to create lists. Books. Journals. Articles. Movies. Authoritative names and subjects. Websites. Etc. All of these lists beg for the organization. Thus, (relational) databases. But Lists need to be short, easily sortable, and/or searchable in order to be useful as finding aids. Indexers make things searchable, not databases. The library profession needs to get its head around the creation of indexes. The Solr/Lucene combination is a good place to start — er, catch up.

Linked data is a new name for the Semantic Web – The Semantic Web is about creating conceptual relationships between things found on the Internet. Believe it or not, the idea is akin to the ultimate purpose of a traditional library card catalog. Have an item in hand. Give it a unique identifier. Systematically describe it. Put all the descriptions in one place and allow people to navigate the space. By following the tracings it is possible to move from one manifestation of an idea to another ultimately providing the means to the discovery, combination, and creation of new ideas. The Semantic Web is almost the exactly the same thing except the “cards” are manifested using RDF/XML on computers through the Internet. From the beginning RDF has gotten a bad name. “Too difficult to implement, and besides the Semantic Web is a thing of science fiction.” Recently the term “linked data” has been used to denote the same process of creating conceptual relationships between things on the ‘Net. It is the Semantic Web by a different name. There is still hope.

Blogging is peaking – There is no doubt about it. The Blogosphere is here to stay, yet people have discovered that it is not very easy to maintain a blog for the long haul. The technology has made it easier to compose and distribute one’s ideas, much to the chagrin of newspaper publishers. On the other hand, the really hard work is coming up with meaningful things to say on a regular basis. People have figured this out, and consequently many blogs have gone by the wayside. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the number of new blogs is decreasing, and the number of postings to existing blogs is decreasing as well. Blogging was “kewl” is cool but also hard work. Blogging is peaking. And by the way, I dislike those blogs which are only partial syndicated. They allow you to read the first 256 characters or so of and entry, and then encourage you to go to their home site to read the whole story whereby you are bombarded with loads of advertising.

Word/tag clouds abound – It seems very fashionable to create word/tag clouds now-a-days. When you get right down to it, word/tag clouds are a whole lot like concordances — one of the first types of indexes. Each word (or tag) in a document is itemized and counted. Stop words are removed, and the results are sorted either alphabetically or numerically by count. This process — especially if it were applied to significant phrases — could be a very effective and visual way to describe the “aboutness” of a file (electronic book, article, mailing list archive, etc.). An advanced feature is to hyperlink each word, tag, or phrase to specific locations in the file. Given a set of files on similar themes, it might be interesting to create word/tag clouds against them in order to compare and contrast. Hmmm…

“Next Generation” library catalogs seem to be defined – From my perspective, the profession has stopped asking questions about the definition of “next generation” library catalogs. I base this statement on two things. First, the number of postings and discussion on a mailing list called NGC4Lib has dwindled. There are fewer questions and even less discussion. Second, the applications touting themselves, more or less, as “next generation” library catalog systems all have similar architectures. Ingest content from various sources. Normalize it into an internal data structure. Store the normalized data. Index the normalized data. Provide access to the index as well as services against the index such as tag, review, and Did You Mean? All of this is nice, but it really isn’t very “next generation”. Instead it is slightly more of the same. An index allows people to find, but people are still drinking from the proverbial fire hose. Anybody can find. In my opinion, the current definition of “next generation” does not go far enough. Library catalogs need to provide an increased number services against the content, not just services against the index. Compare & contrast. Do morphology against. Create word cloud from. Translate. Transform. Buy. Review. Discuss. Share. Preserve. Duplicate. Trace idea, citation, and/or author forwards & backwards. It is time to go beyond novel ways to search lists.

SRU is becoming more viable – SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) is a Web Services-based protocol for searching databases/indexes. Send a specifically shaped URL to a remote HTTP server. Get back a specifically shaped response. SRU has been joined with a no-longer competing standard called OpenSearch in the form of an Abstract Protocol Definition, and the whole is on its way to becoming an OASIS standard. Just as importantly, an increasing number of the APIs supporting the external-facing OCLC Grid Services (WorldCat, Identities, Registries, Terminologies, Metadata Crosswalk) use SRU as the query interface. SRU has many advantages, but some of those advantages are also disadvantages. For example, its query language (CQL) is expressive, especially compared to OpenSearch or Google, but at the same time, it is not easy to implement. Second, the nature of SRU responses can range from rudimentary and simple to obtuse and complicated. More over, the response is always in XML. These factors make transforming the response for human consumption sometimes difficult to implement. Despite all these things, I think SRU is a step in the right direction.

The pendulum of data ownership is swinging – I believe it was Francis Bacon who said, “Knowledge is power”. In my epistemological cosmology, knowledge is based on information, and information is based on data. (Going the other way, knowledge leads to wisdom, but that is another essay.) Therefore, he who owns or has access to the data will ultimately have more power. Google increasingly has more data than just about anybody. They have a lot of power. OCLC increasingly “owns” the bibliographic data created by its membership. Ironically, this data — in both the case of Google and OCLC — is not freely available, even when the data was created for the benefit of the wider whole. I see this movement akin to the movement of a pendulum swinging one way and then the other. On my more pessimistic days I view it as a battle. On my calmer days I see it as a natural tendency, a give and take. Many librarians I know are in the profession, not for the money, but to support some sort of cause. Intellectual freedom. The right to read. Diversity. Preservation of the historical record. If I have a cause it then is about the free and equal access to information. This is why I advocate open access publishing, open source software, and Net Neutrality. When data and information is “owned” and “sold” an environment of information have’s and have not’s manifests itself. Ultimately, this leads to individual gain but not necessarily the improvement of the human condition as a whole.

The Digital Dark Age continues – We, as a society, are continuing to create a Digital Dark Age. Considering all of the aspects of librarianship, the folks who deal with preservation, conservation, and archives have the toughest row to hoe. It is ironic. On one hand there is more data and information available than just about anybody knows what to do with. On the other hand, much of this data and information will not be readable, let alone available, in the foreseeable future. Somebody is going to want to do research on the use of blogs and email. What libraries are archiving this data? We are writing reports and summaries in binary and proprietary formats. Such things are akin to music distributed on 8-track tapes. Where are the gizmos enabling us to read these formats? We increasingly license our most desired content — scholarly journal articles — and in the end we don’t own anything. With the advent of Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and the Open Content Alliance the numbers of freely available electronic books rival the collections of many academic libraries. Who is collecting these things? Do we really want to put all of our eggs into one basket and trust these entities to keep them for the long haul? The HathiTrust understand this phenomonon, and “Lot’s of copies keep stuff safe.” Good. In the current environment of networked information, we need to re-articulate the definition of “collection”.

Finally, regarding change. It manifests itself along a continuum. At one end is evolution. Slow. Many false starts. Incremental. At the other end is revolution. Fast. Violent. Decisive. Institutions and their behaviors change slowly. Otherwise they wouldn’t be the same institutions. Librarianship is an institution. Its behavior changes slowly. This is to be expected.

• “Bling” in your website – I hate to admit it, but it seems increasingly necessary to make sure your institution’s website be aesthetically appealing. This might seem obvious to you, but considering the fact we all think “content is king” we might have to reconsider. Whether we like it or not, people do judge a book by its cover, and people do judge other’s on their appearance. Websites aren’t very much different. While librarians are great at organizing information bibliographically, we stink when it comes to organizing things visually. Think graphic design. Break down and hire a graphic designer, and temper their output with usability tests. We all have our various strengths and weaknesses. Graphic designers have something to offer that, in general, librarians lack.
• Data sets – Increasingly it is not enough for the scholar or researcher to evaluate old texts or do experiments and then write an article accordingly. Instead it is becoming increasingly important to distribute the data and information the scholar or researcher used to come to their conclusions. This data and information needs to be just as accessible as the resulting article. How will this access be sustained? How will it be described and made available? To what degree will it be important to preserve this data and/or migrate it forward in time? These sorts of questions require some thought. Libraries have experience in these regards. Get your foot in the door, and help the authors address these issues.
• Institutional repositories – I don’t hear as much noise about institutional repositories as I used to hear. I think their lack of popularity is directly related to the problems they are designed to solve, namely, long-term access. Don’t get me wrong, long-term access is definitely a good thing, but that is a library value. In order to be compelling, institutional repositories need to solve the problems of depositors, not the librarians. What do authors get by putting their content in an institutional repository that they don’t get elsewhere? If they supported version control, collaboration, commenting, tagging, better syndication and possibilities for content reuse — in other words, services against the content — then institutional repositories might prove to be more popular.
• Mobile devices – The iPhone represents a trend in mobile computing. It is both cool and “kewl” for three reasons: 1) its physical interface complete with pinch and drag touch screen options make it easy to use; you don’t need to learn how to write in its language, 2) its always-on and endlessly-accessible connectivity to the Internet make it trivial to keep in touch, read mail, and “surf the Web”, 3) its software interface is implemented in the form of full-blown applications, not dummied down text interfaces with lot’s of scrolling lists. Apple Computer got it right. Other companies will follow suit. Sooner or later we will all by walking around like people from the Starship Enterprise. “Beam me up, Scotty!” Consider integrating into your services the ability to text the content of library research to a telephone.
• Net Neutrality – The Internet, by design, is intended to be neutral, but increasingly Internet Service Providers (ISP) are twisting the term “neutrality” to mean, “If you pay a premium, then we won’t throttle your network connection.” Things like BitTorrent is a good example. This technique exploits the Internet making file transfers more efficient, but ISPs want to inhibit it and/or charge more for its use. Yet again, the values and morals of a larger, more established community, in this case capitalism, are influencing the Internet. Similar value changes manifested themselves when email became commonplace. Other values, such as not wasting Internet bandwidth by transferring unnecessarily large files over the ‘Net, have changed as both the technology and the numbers of people using the Internet have changed. Take a stand for “Net Neutrality”.
• “Next generation” library catalogs – The profession has finally figured it out. Our integrated library systems don’t solve the problems of our users. Consequently, the idea of the “next generation” library catalog is all the rage, but don’t get too caught up in features such as Did You Mean?, faceted browse, cover art, or the ability of include a wide variety of content into a single interface. Such things are really characteristics and functions of underlying index. They are all things designed to make it easier to accomplish the problem of find, but this is not the problem to be solved. Google make it easy to find. Really easy. We are unable to compete in that arena. Everybody can find, and we are still “drinking” from the proverbial “fire hose”. Instead, think about ways to enable the patron to use the content they find. Put the content into context. Like the institutional repositories, above, and the open access content, below, figure out way to make the content useful. Empower the patron. Enable them to apply actions against the content, not just the index. Such things are exemplified by action verbs. Tag. Share. Review. Add. Read. Save. Delete. Annotate. Index. Syndicate. Cite. Compare forward and backward in time. Compare and contrast with other documents. Transform into other formats. Distill. Purchase. Sell. Recommend. Rate. Create flip book. Create tag cloud. Find email address of author. Discuss with colleagues. Etc. The types of services implementable by “next generation” library catalogs is as long as the list of things people do with the content they find in libraries. This is one of the greatest opportunities facing our profession.
• Open Access Publishing – Like its sister, institutional repositories, I don’t hear as much about open access publishing as I used to hear. We all know it is a “good thing” but like so many things that are “free” its value is only calculated by the amount of money paid for it. “The journals from this publisher are very expensive. We had better promote them and make them readily visible on our website in order for us to get our money’s worth.” In a library setting, the value of material is not based on dollars but rather on things such as but limited to usefulness, applicability, keen insight, scholarship, and timeliness. Open access publishing content manifests these characteristics as much a traditionally published materials. Open access content can be made even more valuable if its open nature were exploited. Like the content found in institutional repositories, and like the functions of “next generation” library catalogs outlined above, the ability to provide services against open access content are almost limitless. More than any other content, open access content combined with content from things like the Open Content Alliance and Project Gutenburg can be freely collected, indexed, searched, and then put into the context of the patron. Create bibliography. Trace citation. Find similar words and phrases between articles and books. Take an active role in making open access publishing more of a reality. Don’t wait for the other guy. You are a part of the solution.
• Social networking – Social networking is beyond a trend. It is all but a fact of the Internet. Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn as well as Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious are probably the archetypical social networking sites. They have very little content of their own. Instead, they provide a platform for others to provide content — and then services against that content. (“Does anybody see a trend in these trends, yet?”) What these social networking sites are exploiting is a new form of the numbers game. Given a wide enough audience it is possible to find and create sets of others interested in just about any topic under the sun. These people will be passionate about their particular topic. They will be sincere, adamant, and arduous about making sure the content is up-date, accurate, and thoroughly described and accessible. Put your content into these sorts of platforms in the same way the Library of Congress as well as the Smithsonian Institution has put some of their content into Flickr. A rising tide floats all boats. Put your boat into the water. Participate in this numbers game. It is not really about people using your library, but rather about people using the content you have made available.
• Web Services-based APIs – xISBN and thingISBN. The Open Library API. The DLF ILS-DI Technical Recommendation. SRU and OpenSearch. OAI-PMH and now OAI-ORE. RSS and ATOM. All of these things are computing techniques called Web Services Application Programmer Interfaces (API). They are computer-to-computer interfaces akin to things like Z39.50 of Library Land. They enable computers to unambiguously share data between themselves. A number of years ago implementing Web Services meant learning things like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDL. These things were (are) robust, well-documented, and full-featured. They are also non-trivial to learn. (OCLC’s Terminology Service embedded within Internet Explorer uses these techniques.) After that REST become more popular. Simpler, and exploits the features of HTTP. The idea was (is) send a URL to a remote computer. Get a response back as XML. Transform the response and put it to use — usually display things on a Web page. This is the way most of the services work (“There’s that word again!”) The latest paradigm and increasingly popular technique uses a data structure called JSON as opposed to XML as the form of the server’s response because JSON is easier to process with Javascript. This is very much akin to AJAX. Despite the subtle differences between each of these Web Services computing techniques, there is a fundamental commonality. Make a request. Wait. Get a response. Do something with the content — make it useful. Moreover, the returned content is devoid of display characteristics. It is just data. It is your responsibility to turn it into information. Learn to: 1) make your content accessible via Web Services, and 2) learn how to aggregate content through Web Services in order to enhance your patron’s experience.

Wow!! Where did all of that come from?

• The use of Linux as a server platform as well as a desktop platform will increase – The latest version of Windows seems to have gone over like a lead balloon. Institutions still have server-class needs. Add these two things together, and you will see more IT shops considering and adopting Linux for their operating system. At a much slower pace, Linux will increasingly appear on user desktops because retailers are selling dirt-cheap computers with Linux pre-installed. Ubuntu, a particular Linux distribution, gets rave reviews for its user interface. Clean. Easy to use, and easy to learn. As Linux becomes more predominant, so will the concept of open source software, and that is an additional ball of wax that has already been mentioned numerous times.
• Open access will grow, I hope – H.R. 2764 was put into law this past month. In it was a provision mandating recipients of NIH grants to submit their articles to PubMed 12 months after publication. This ought to bring a flood of content to bare. We can only hope that a precedent will be set and more content will become open access from publicly funded sources. If this comes to fruition, then this will be a boon to acquisitions departments. “How can we collect, archive, and preserve this content for the long haul?” Remember, “lots of copies keep stuff safe”, and it is foolish and antiquated to think it is more efficient to keep digital things in only one place; it behooves libraries to collect and index this content. The stuff that will last for decades (if not centuries) will be the stuff that is duplicated over and over again.


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• Social networking spaces will mature a bit more – For the most part, humans are social beings. We seek out groups of others, not just individuals but entire societies. If this is true, then it is natural for social networking communities to exist. Ironically, they are nothing new. How many of you remember Usenet or even dial-up bulletin board systems? The difference now-a-days is the proliferation of the Web browsers instead of modems. There are may social network places: MySpace, Linked-In, Facebook, etc. Each of these function but Facebook, with its ability to allow people to create programs for it through its application programmer interface (API), will probably grow faster than the others. Yes, the addition of the API provides more functionality, but more importantly, it harnesses the power of networked people the same way the development of Linux harnessed networked people. Centralized authorities may be ideal (more or less) when there is not a lot of communication between large groups of people. Consider the governments of the Middle Ages. When communication and accessibility channels are flattened the work of the whole group comes to bear more effectively. For these reasons, social networking spaces will continue to grow. The environment is ripe.
• Blogging will continue to effect the way we communicate – Blogging most certainly was cutting edge two years ago. The blog-o-matic such as bloglines.com was in vogue. The technological infrastructure to make a blog happen was cheap, if not free. It was cool to have a blog. While it is still cool, I see many blogs going by the wayside and not getting updated. I believe this is true because people realized the time commitment a truly successful blog requires, namely, having something to say on regular basis and knowing how to say it in writing. Yet, the good (and prolific) writers who blog will exert an influence in the way we think and share ideas. I have been told that the following sounds very librarianish but I still think it is true. One of the powers of writing is that it transcends both space and time. Something can be written in the here and now but communicated with somebody across the globe three years from now. Very powerful. Blogs amplify this power.

Finally, the entity that has made all of these things possible has been our network of globally accessible computers. Each one of those words (“network”, “globally”, “accessible” and “computers”) packs a wollup, and combined into a single thing represent a huge change in the way we live and work. Let’s call that the understatment of the decade.

–
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame

January 7, 2008

The home page is complete with bunch’s o’ documentation, sample scripts, descriptive text outlining what MyLibrary is (and is not), mailing list administratativia, links to sample applications and production-level applications, etc. The whole thing lives on top of WordPress.

MyLibrary is not an application as much as it is digital library framework and toolbox. MyLibrary is about creating relationships between the three primary entities of libraries: 1) information resources, 2) librarians, and 3) patrons. It does this through the management of an institution-defined controlled vocabulary of facets and terms. By classifying resources, librarians, and patrons with facet/term combinations MyLibrary can address things like:

• As a librarian, my collection includes…
• As a patron, my databases are…
• People like me also use…
• Other resources like this include…
• If you use this, then you might like…
• As a patron, my librarian is…
• As a librarian, my patrons are…
• Resources for my class include…

Google, thanks. Imitation is the sincerest from of flattery, but I doubt Google knew about our, the library profession’s, MyLibrary.

1. Gaming and Second Life – I hear a lot of noise about gaming, Second Life, and libraries. Hmmm…

I consider librarianship to be about a number of processes surrounding data, information, and knowledge, specifically: 1) collection, 2) organization, 3) preservation, 4) dissemination, and 5) sometimes evaluation. I also consider the intended audiences for these processes in my definition. Oftentimes these audiences determine the types of libraries where the processes are carried out: academic, special, public, school, etc. Notice that I did not outline “how” these processes get accomplished. Since the “how” of these processes changes over time and with changes in technology, I do not think any “how” defines the core of librarianship. (Librarianship is not about books, MARC records, nor even Web pages because these are merely tools of the profession.)

That being said, I can see how gaming and Second Life can play a role in some libraries. Gaming and Second Life are digital virtual worlds. There are norms of behavior there. Things “exist” in these environments. People “live” there. Commercial transactions take place. Many gamers and Second Lifer’s are younger as opposed to older. We are increasingly told to put our content where the users are. Think MySpace and Facebook. Why would we suppose that there are not needs for data, information, and knowledge in Second Life? While I do not think gaming and Second Life is the next big thing for all libraries, I do believe they are things to keep in mind.

2. “Next Generation” Library Catalogs – As the owner/moderator of the NGC4Lib mailing list, it is my responsibility to listen to it’s traffic. After doing so I am able to outline a few things I see going on there. Again, they are listed in no priority order.

First, there seems to be a growing consensus that MARC, as a data structure, is not apropos for any “next generation” library system. This is true for a number of reasons the most important being, if libraries are partially about disseminating data, information, and knowledge, then we need to speak the language of the intended audience. In computing terms, this language is XML. Ask yourself, “How many communities know how to read and write MARC records?” Now ask yourself, “How many communities know how to read and write XML?” MARC was cool (and even “kewl”) in it’s day. It has outlived it’s true usefulness and it is an impediment to innovation.

Second, there seems to be an increasing understanding that any future “catalog” is not really a “catalog” but more like a tool enabling the user to get their primary work done quicker and easier. More and more it seems the “next generation” library catalog will enable people to not only find things but acquire things and apply services against those things. Send it to me. Save it. Annotate. Review. Rank. Compare & contrast it to other items. Share it with my friends and colleagues. Everybody has access to content. The next level of librarianship is to provide more services against the content.

Faceted browse makes a lot of noise, but I’d be careful. It is not a silver bullet, nor is it magic. Faceted browsing simply turns search results inside out. Define a set of “facets”. Subjects. Authors. Formats. Genres. Etc. Do a search. Extract the facet terms. Create a browsable list from them. Link them to canned searches. Done. Don’t get me wrong. Faceted browsing is definitely a step in the right direction, but it is only one small step toward making library content more accessible and easier to find. (Maybe I’m just jealous because MyLibrary has supported faceted classification for more than four years and nobody noticed.)

Dis-integration. This is word increasingly used when talking about library systems. I agree. What is really desirable is not one large system like Microsoft Office but a set of littler systems adhering to a set of common interoperable standards. These smaller systems might include one for creating and editing (XML) metadata — cataloging. Another might be for lending materials — circulation. Another is for indexing content and providing (SRU, OpenSearch, and/or Z39.50) search services against it — the OPAC. In such an environment a library can swap out any existing metadata editor and choose another. They can swap out one indexer for another. If the library community insists on the use of standard protocols not turnkey solutions, then the dis-integrated library system will become a reality. It will also open the field to an greater number of technical solutions and vendors from a dwindling pool of choices.

Finally, one technical solution for creating the “next generation” library catalog seems to be a multi-staged process: 1) create metadata using your existing system, 2) export or expose your data in a common format such as MARC, XML, or OAI-PMH, 3) harvest the data into a central store, 4) supplement the data with article-level bibliographic data, 5) index all the data, 6) provide services against the index beginning with search and browse. This seems to be the way of OCLC’s WorldCat Local, Ex Libris’s Primo, and the University of Rochester’s XC. Compared to metasearch interfaces, it makes a lot of computing sense because it facilitates much better possibilities for relevancy ranking, and it does not rely on a multitude of remotely located machines and diverse protocols for search results.

3. Operating system agnostic computing or “the network is the computer” – Have you noticed that it does not really matter what type of computer you are using in order for you to get your work done? I edit text and image files, send email, update my calendar, re-calculate spreadsheets, update databases, browse the Web, etc. More and more of this work is done over the Internet. Google is offering many of these tools for free. It allows for cross-platform computing even between home and office. It sort of feels like we are beginning to see the re-birth of the “thin client”. Like dis-integration, very little of this is possible without a set of common (non-proprietary) standards.

4. Things not going away – There are a number of other things that have been mentioned in this venue previously, and they are still apropos. For example, open source software is here to stay and continues to influence the whole of computing as well as Library Land. Open access publishing is growing and continues to exist beside traditional publishing. Successful open access publishing activities require substantial investments in time. While the content from open access is “free” it is really only as “free as a ‘free’ kitten”. In this regard open access is very much like open source software. Neither one come without costs. Microformats such as COiNS and UnAPI are truly useful. I think we will see a growing number of these things being developed inside and outside libraries, but until tools for exploiting them become ubiquitous none of the microformats will predominate.

Whew! How’s that?

–
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame

June 15, 2007

Someone asked:

> I wonder if I might ask you a question or two about
> your Team IDR, please? One of the first things on my
> to do list is to create an implementation team, and
> I’m finding that huge numbers of people should
> ideally be included one way or the other. Your full
> team was a large one (appendix A). Do you have any
> sage advice on how to coordinate such a large team?
> Did you have a smaller, core working team? Any advice
> you might have would be much appreciated.

In many ways I am proud about the work we did here in the Libraries regarding our one-year institutional pilot project, and the size of Team IDR is one of those things. Thank you for asking, and I do not have sage advice, just reflections on experience.

1. As the project was initiated I thought about the types of skills that would be required of the project, and I boiled them down to at least three: 1) people/communication skills, 2) computer/technical skills, and 3) metadata/cataloging skills. I then realized that each of these skill sets existed in our division of 50-some people.

2. I actively recruited people by first drawing up a flyer outlining the broadest objectives of the project. The flyer was less than half a sheet of paper long. I went around to everybody in the division, gave them the flyer, told them I sincerely thought they would have something to offer, and asked them to volunteer. After it was all said and done I had recruited about seventeen people.

3. There were meetings, but not very many of them, about one every three months. At the first meeting I outlined the broadest of objectives, again, and reiterated that I believed everybody had something to offer. I then outlined a number of group guidelines. These were expected norms of behavior: 1) everybody will keep their electronic calendar up-to-date, 2) we will try to make decisions based on consensus, and if that doesn’t work I will make a decision in consultation with my boss, 3) we all do all the work but not necessarily all the time, meaning nobody can be too snobby to say, “I don’t do data-entry”, and 4) people are expected to finish their tasks on time, and if they can’t then they are supposed to give fair warning accordingly and more time will be allotted. These rules seemed to to work very well.

4. I divided the project into smaller tasks like: establishing relationships with content providers, learning and installing software, learning about and implementing metadata standards, doing data-entry, etc. I then asked for volunteers to investigate these tasks and most importantly asked them how much time they thought would be necessary to complete them. Time was then allocated and they went off to do their work. My role was to articulate the what of the job, and I took a back seat when it came to the how. I let the sub-groups decide the how’s.

5. About one third through the project we had a party — a social event — allowing us to mix and mingle. Specifically, I cooked grilled cheese sandwiches for everybody while everybody else brought drinks, chips, paper product, etc.

6. As the project progressed and about once every three weeks I got one person from outside the division express an interest in joining the project. I gave them the spiel about the norms, asked them what they wanted to do, and they became a member. Consequently, over time, the group grew to about twenty-eight people.

7. As far as the people outside the library go, they were recruited as content providers. Two or three meetings were held with them in small groups. I kept them in the loop, and they passively participated. In the end we had touch about fifty people outside the libraries.

8. Towards the end we hosted another grilled cheese sandwich lunch and asked everybody involved to join. About thirty showed up. This event drew closure to the process.

If I were to do this again, then I would not change very much about the process, and I would recommend a few things:

* As leader outline the what, not the how – Let the “people doing the work” decide the how. Trust their judgement. That is what they were hired to do.

* Sponsor a social event so people can get to know each other, interact in a non-work setting, and to celebrate your successes.

* Set clear expectation regarding group behavior – Attend meetings on time. Respect each other’s skills and opinions. Keep your calendar up to date. Etc.

* Give positive feedback – When somebody does something well, let them know it in a public or private setting, whichever they feel most comfortable.

* Understand that everybody has skills to offer – Catalogers. Clerks. Computer types. Graphic designers. Reference librarians. Bibliographers. Etc. While you might not have all the skills you need, figure out ways to exploit the one’s you do have. Understand that the people working on the group have more things in common than they do differences. Focus on these similarities.

* As leader one of your primary jobs is to facilitate communication – Use many mediums. Email. Paper. Open forums. Small meetings. Big meetings. Demonstrations. One-on-one coffee sessions. The leader is the “glue” and/or the “electrical conductor” of the process. Communication is not efficient. The message needs to be communicated many times and in many ways. People will not get it the first time. They will need to be reminded and given time to think before they can respond. It is really hard to communicate too much.

* Finally, and just about most importantly, set reasonable time schedules and do your very best to stick with them – If you know your project is only a year long, then figure out what you can do in that amount of time and try like heck to stick with it. Put another way, define what success looks like at the beginning of the process, divide the process into smaller tasks, and try really hard not to change course in mid-stream. When additional priorities present themselves (and they always do), go to your boss and say, “Hey, you told me to do this, and now you are telling me to do that. Make up my mind!”

–
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame

* Full-text data/information is increasingly available. Now this presents real opportunities (as well as challenges) for libraries. To what degree is surrogate description necessary when full-text indexing an option.

* Increasingly libraries are thinking about repurposing existing staff. “I know things are changing. What can I do to remain relevant?” Just asking the question says you are going in the right direction.

* iPhones & friends are coming in a bigger way, and user’s expectations will change accordingly. As a profession we enjoy words, and I wonder how we will provide services to such devices when we are unable to be verbose.

* Library catalogs are a hot topic. Even though I have been a bit more outspoken about catalogs than most people, I wonder whether or not this is something our patrons/users really care about. Hmmm…

* There is an increasing amount of vendor consolidation going on. It is too bad the library community is so small, otherwise the government would get involved. I think there needs to be greater amount of choice. The same thing goes for scholarly publishers. There is some value in competition.

* Ubiquitous networking. While the ‘Net is not everywhere all the time, it is getting closer. How will 100% all-the-time access to the Internet change the way we do business?

* XML is not a hot topic, but trend-wise I think increasing numbers of people will begin to see the advantages of it. It is so much more flexible than that “other” data structure.

* Yes, AJAX is all the rage, but how accessible are those interfaces to people with various physical disabilities? It is very difficult to serve two masters.

–
Eric Lease Morgan
January 16, 2007

I must admit that there are few things that do not succeed over time without some sort of commercial interest. Think OCLC. JSTOR. Even NOTIS. The only exception to the rule seems to be when government subsidizes the process.

Be that as it may, I will still advocate a large dose of grass roots efforts lead by the library community exploiting open source software over something created by a commercial institution. At least for now. Moreover, when your fellow librarians say things like, “We tried those ‘homegrown’ systems a long time ago, and where are they now? We need vendor-supported software”, I can give you a number of reasons why this is not necessarily the case in today’s environment:

1. Computer hardware & software – Twenty or more years ago, when the library profession was supporting “homegrown” systems, the hardware used was vendor-specific. Maybe you had a Prime. A Unisys. An IBM 360. A DEC Watchamacallit. A Sun Something. Etc. These computers had less RAM, less disk space, and less processing power than the computer you have on your desktop right now. Each of these computers had their own operating system and set of programming languages used to create applications. The applications created for these systems was not sharable between computers, and consequently is was difficult, if not impossible, to share code between libraries. Now-a-days the applications will be written for Unix/Linux or Java — platforms that are not computer hardware specific. (If someone creates a Microsoft-based “next generation” library catalog, run the other way, very fast.) The code written for one computer will run on the next computer (no puns intended) without much modification, and this will enable the library community to collaborate to a greater degree.

2. Relational databases – Relational databases and the technology used to implement them was embryonic when libraries were supporting their “homegrown” systems. There were few, if any, well-supported best practices for managing large sets of information. And even when you did you sat around worrying whether or not you should allocate two bytes of disk space to denote the name of a state or twelve. These problems are far less challenging now with the cost of disk space and the availability of any number of relational database applications. The problems of storing the data is much less limiting than it was twenty years ago.

3. Indexing technology – Databases are great for storing and manipulating information. Ironically, they are poor on searching. To search a database you must know the underlying structure of the data. Indexes remove this problem. They invert the content of the database creating lists of words and pointers to records. No knowledge of the database’s structure is necessary. Couple this with statistical analysis and indexing technology begins to appear “smart” — think relevance ranking. Indexing technology has matured to a very large degree in the past twenty years, and there are a large number of freely available indexers. How many indexers were available twenty years ago? One, maybe. BRS.

4. Skills – Computers twenty or more years ago were expensive, very expensive. Much fewer people had access to computers and a proportional number of fewer people had computer expertise. Now-a-days hackers abound. [1] If they didn’t we wouldn’t have the email, Web servers, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Linux, or just about anything related to the Internet. Put another way, there are many many more people now-a-days who know how to make computers do the things they do. There are computer programmers around, they just don’t work in libraries to a large degree. “Libraries are about books. Right?”

5. Communication – Communication via the telephone is dirt cheap. You can make long distance telephone calls for pennies. From my workplace here in Indiana I can talk on the telephone with people in the United Kingdom for .02¢/minute. At those rates it is silly not to pick up the telephone. The biggest thing the Internet does is facilitate communication. People-to-people communication. People-to-computer communication. Computer-to-computer communication. Twenty years ago the story was much different. You were lucky to have a 2400 baud modem and you dared not make a long-distance telephone call. Because of our increasingly seamless ability to communicate across long distances, it will be easier for libraries to coordinate their effort and create something from the community.

In short, don’t let people write you off when you say, “We can built it ourselves.” Explain to them how the computer environment is substantially different from previous times. Enumerate the things outlined above. Yes, the human challenges still exist. Building consensus. Setting priorities. Keeping things on schedule. Creating communities. Bringing people physically together. Allocating time, space, people, and money. But are those the things you want to pay a vendor for? The other things are “as free as a free kitten.”

Food for thought on a Friday afternoon.

[1] Hackers in this context are contrasted with “crackers”. Hackers are the good guys. They look at source code and figure out ways to improve it or modify it for their own purposes. Crackers, on the other hand, are malicious. They look for ways to exploit software for immoral purposes.

The full text of this document formatted as a single HTML page is available at:

http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/ngc/

Executive summary

People’s expectations regarding search and access to information have dramatically changed with the advent of the Internet. Library online public access catalogs (OPAC’s) have not kept up with these changes. The proposed “next generation” library catalog is an attempt to address this phenomenon. It’s design less like a “catalog” — an inventory list — and more like a finding aid. It contains data as well as metadata, and it is bent on doing things with found items beyond listing and providing access to them. It is built using open standards, open source software, and open content in an effort to increase interoperability, modularity, and advocate the free sharing of ideas.

Technically speaking, this “next generation” library catalog is a database/index combination. The database is made up of XML files of various types: MODS, TEI, EAD, etc. The index is a full-text index supplemented with XML-specific elements as well as Dublin Core names. End-user access to the system will be through a number of searchable/browsable interfaces facilitated by SRW/U. Services against individual items from the interfaces (such as borrow, download, review, etc.) will be facilitated via OpenURL.

The implementation of this “next generation” library catalog is divided into a seven-step process:

1. Allocate resources
2. Answer questions regarding information architecture
3. Conduct surveys, focus group interviews, and usability studies
4. Create/maintain the “next generation” library catalog
5. On a daily basis go to Step #4
6. On a quarterly basis go to Step #3
7. On an annual basis go to Step #1

The full text of this document formatted as a single HTML page is available at:

http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/ngc/

Introduction

In library parlance, an OPAC is an “online public access catalog”. The operative word in this phrase is “catalog”. Traditionally speaking, the OPAC is thought of as an index to the things owned or licensed by a library. It is an electronic version of the venerable card catalog. As such it contains “cards” pointing to books, not the books themselves. It contains “cards” pointing to article indexes but not the articles themselves. Because libraries do not own them, library OPAC’s, for the most part, do not contain pointers to Internet resources because they are too dynamic in nature to maintain. These things, along with the bibliographic indexes, are relegated to a library’s website, which, in turn, becomes information silos. Metasearch technology has tried to bring these things together under one search interface but with little success. As a catalog, OPAC’s are akin to inventory lists allowing people to search for and identify things in or available from libraries. Beyond identification, OPAC’s do not provide very many services against holdings besides the ability to borrow.

The OPAC should not be equated with an ILS — the integrated library system. The ILS is a suite of software automating much of the traditional processes of librarianship. For example, there are circulation modules enabling libraries to keep track of who has borrowed what. There are acquisition modules allowing bibliographers to keep track of how much money they have spent and allows other people to do the actual purchasing. There are cataloging modules enabling catalogers to create MARC records and supplement them with controlled vocabularies and authority lists. Other modules provide functionality for interlibrary loan, the reserve book room, serials acquisitions, etc. The OPAC is the public face of a library, and in the big picture, it is traditionally an additional module in the ILS.

In the past decade people’s expectations regarding search and the access to information have dramatically changed. The proliferation of desktop computers, the increasing amount of content “born digital”, and the advent of the Internet have all contributed to this phenomenon. People expect to enter one or two words (or maybe a phrase) into a search box, click a button, get a list of relevancy ranks results returned, select an item from the results, and view/download the information. The process is quick, easy, and immediate. Even though people know the information available from libraries is free and authoritative they often use libraries as a last resort because they see library systems are overwhelmingly associated with books, confusing, difficult to use, time consuming, and inconvenient.

The proposed “next generation” library catalog is intended to address the issues outlined above. It builds on the good work previously done by the library profession through collection, preservation, organization, and dissemination. It takes into account the changing nature of user expectations and tries to meet them. It exploits computer technology and harnesses the knowledge built up by the information retrieval and digital library communities. The goal of the “next generation” library catalog is to create a transparent system enabling library users to get their work done more quickly and efficiently. It will not be seen as an impediment to learning, teaching, and scholarship, but rather as useful tool for getting an education and increasing the sphere of knowledge.

Assumptions

As the saying goes, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” Similarly, there will be no such thing as the “next generation” library catalog, only variations on a theme. Each implementation of a “next generation” library catalog will by slightly different, and the differences will probably be rooted in the individual implementation’s underlying assumptions. There are a number of assumptions underlying the design of this particular “next generation” library catalog, and they are enumerated below.

It is not a catalog

The “next generation” library catalog is not a catalog, per se.

The “next generation” library catalog is not intended to be searchable list of the things a library owns or licenses. It is more than that. It is a list of the things deemed useful for achieving the goals of the library’s parent organization. The world of information has moved beyond books, magazines, and videos. The computers and the Internet has spawned mailing lists (full of names, addresses, and telephone numbers), data sets, images, full-text books and journal articles, archival finding aids, pre-prints & other gray literature, etc. To various degrees all of these things are important to meeting the needs of library users. To the best of its ability, the “next generation” library catalog includes the full-text of these items or at least metadata describing these items in its collection.

It avoids multiple databases

The “next generation” library catalog avoids multiple databases and indexes, thus increasing simplicity and reducing the problem of de-duplication.

Multiple databases and multiple indexes increase complexity and necessitate an increase in computer infrastructure. They create information silos and make it challenging to create holistic systems. By avoiding the creation of multiple databases and indexes it will be easier to do global searching and refinement. Reducing information overload after returning too many hits will be overcome through the use of faceted browsing, an “intelligent” user interface, and the ability to create tightly focused queries against the index.

It is bent on providing services against search results

The “next generation” library catalog’s user interface is bent on doing things with found items beyond listing and providing access to them. Again, the “next generation” library catalog is not a catalog but a tool.

Just think of all the things you can do with a physical book. You can place a hold on it. You can request it for document delivery (borrow it). You can renew it. With a tiny bit of work we could turn the book’s metadata into a Chicago style citation for inclusion in a paper. We could allow people to review the book. We could allow people to purchase the book from a bookstore. Many of the same things can be applied to printed journal articles, but electronic journal articles are a different story. They lend themselves to a greater number of services such as download, print, save, annotate, index along with a set of other downloaded things. With adequate metadata it would be relatively easy to feed a system a book or journal article and request a list of possible email addresses for the author.

Put another way, the “next generation” library catalog provides services against items in its collection. These are value-added services provided by the library, and in turn, saving the time of the reader and making them more productive.

It is built using things open

This “next generation” library catalog is built using open standards, open source software, and open content in an effort to increase interoperability, modularity, and advocate the free sharing of ideas.

Librarianship is a highly collaborative profession. We share cataloging records. We jointly purchase/license materials. We share in the creation of collections. Our professional meetings measure in the 10′s of thousands of people. Much of this is facilitated through the use of open standards like Z39.50, MARC, and AACR2. Hardware and software are crucial to the provision of the “next generation” library catalog, and it is a well-known fact that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Therefore open source software will be used in order to keep things transparent. Finally, open content such as articles from open access journals, full-text books from Project Gutenberg, theses & dissertations available from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, and preprints from open archives data repositories will be given priority in an effort to highlight advocate the use of information unencumbered by licensing agreements. This does not mean commercially available content will not be included, but access to the content or its metadata must be provided through some sort of open standard such as OAI-PMH or XML files.

The full text of this document formatted as a single HTML page is available at:

http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/ngc/

Technological design

Model for a “next generation” library catalog

Technically speaking, this “next generation” library catalog is the combination of a relational database with a full-text index. Access to this database/index combination is provided through open standards such as Z39.50, SRW/U, OpenURL, and OAI-PMH.

Database

The database is designed to contain XML files enhanced with facet/term combinations. When at all possible these XML files (based on any DTD or XML schema) will represent a complete, atomic information resource such as a book marked-up in TEI or an article in XHTML. When it is impossible or impractical to acquire the full text of a resource, then a metadata record describing the resource will be used instead. In these cases MODS records, EAD files, or something like Dublin Core elements harvested from OAI repositories and packaged as RDF streams will be stored in the database.

The description of each XML record in the database will be enhanced with one or more facet/term combinations. The definition and creation of these combinations are left up to each library to articulate, but some facets might include: Formats, Audiences, Disciplines, XML Types, or Flags. Some example terms might include: Books, Journals, Articles, Freshman, Sophomores, Juniors, Astronomy, Music, Philosophy, MODS, TEI, RDF, Downloadable, Checked-out, or World-accessible.

Given this design, the database only contains four tables as illustrated by the following entity-relationship diagram:

Entity-relationship diagram for the “next generation” library catalog

Indexer

Databases are great for storing data and information, but, ironically, they are weak on finding data and information. Indexers are best used for facilitating search, and thus the need for an indexer in the “next generation” library catalog.

The entire content of each record in the database will be indexed. This means each record will be full-text searchable. To improve both precision and recall each record will also be indexed according it its most significant XML elements. Because the database will contain a wide variety of XML files represented by different DTD’s and schemas, a best practices effort will be made to additionally map the XML elements to Dublin Core names. Using this approach records from the index should be accessible via free-text terms/phrases, DTD/schema-specific element names, as well as a set of commonly used fields represented by Dublin Core. At the very least the indexer is expected to support unicode and incremental updating. The native query language of the indexer is expected to support free-text, phrase, and field searching as well as Boolean operations, nested queries, right-hand truncation, stemming, sorting, and relevance ranking.

End-user access

End-user access to the database/index will be through standard protocols such as Z39.30, SRW/U, OpenURL, and OAI-PMH. Access to the system using their native interfaces is discouraged. While the use of the protocols may bypass some “kewl” features of the underlying database or search engine, they will enable the system to be more modular in nature. Such an approach will enable one indexer to be supplanted by another indexer with much greater ease. Similarly, when new databases become available or better protocol implementations are created the older tools can be replaced with their improved counter-parts.

This does not mean end-users will be expected to know the specific syntaxes of the abstract protocols in order to access the system. At the outset users will be presented with an HTML-based interface. From there they will be able to search and browse the system. Queries will be sent to the Z39.50 or SRW/U servers for processing and items will be returned supplemented with ways to expand and narrow the results. This search/browse process is repeated until the end-user identifies specific items of interest.

When an item from the search results is selected by the user an OpenURL is sent to a resolver. The resolver will return a list of functions — services — that can be applied against the item. Borrow. Download. Edit. Review. Annotate. Share. Delete. Index. Search. Find More Like This One. Discuss. Find author and email them. Create citation. Summarize. Write paper. Trace idea backwards. Trace idea forwards. Print. Email. Collaborate. Save. Archive. Translate. Show definition. Show synonym. Graph. Chart. Prioritize. Evaluate. Rate. Rank. Illustrate. Authenticate source. Etc. This list of services will be generated based on the characteristics of the item and represents a set of things the user can do with the item. For example, full-text articles are downloadable, and physical books are borrowable. The list of services is only limited by the time, energy, and imagination of the implementors.

The full text of this document formatted as a single HTML page is available at:

http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/ngc/

Implementation: A Seven-step process

This section proposes a step-by-step approach for creating a “next generation” library catalog, but the process can be summarized in the following way:

1. Allocate resources
2. Answer questions regarding information architecture
3. Conduct surveys, focus group interviews, and usability studies
4. Create/maintain the “next generation” library catalog
5. On a daily basis go to Step #4
6. On a quarterly basis go to Step #3
7. On an annual basis go to Step #1

1. Allocate resources

The “next generation” library catalog needs time, money, people with specific skills, and hardware to implement. This section outlines these things in greater detail.

You will need to assemble a team of people to do the work, unless of course Leonardo Di Vinci works in your library. Few people posses all of the necessary skills. At the very least your team will probably consist of a:

• systems administrator
• computer programmer
• graphic designer
• subject specialist

Systems administrator

The systems administrator is responsible for maintaining your computer’s hardware, software, and networking infrastructure. They need to be knowledgeable about operating systems, filesystems, users/groups, and Internet connections.

Programmer

The programmer is responsible for creating functional interfaces to the underlying system. Some of these interfaces are computer-to-computer interfaces such as the importing of MARC records or processing SRU queries. Other interfaces will have human components, and in such cases the programmer will need to work closely with the graphic designer. It is essential for the programmer to be familiar with object-oriented programming techniques, XML along with Web Services computing, and common gateway interface (CGI) scripting.

Graphic designer

The graphic designer is responsible for making sure your human-to-computer interfaces are usable and aesthetically pleasing. (Usability is different from functionality.) They need to have an in-depth knowledge of HTML, XML, cascading stylesheets, and the principles of user-centered design. Ideally the user interfaces written by the programmer programmer will output rudimentary HTML with plenty of HTML class and id attributes to be used as hooks for the cascading stylesheets. Through the stylesheets the graphic designer should be able to modify the look & feel of the interface.

Subject specialist/librarian

Finally, the team will require someone who is knowledgeable about content, a subject specialist/librarian. This person will bring to the team the principles collection development, cataloging & classification, as well as reference services — all of the traditional activities of librarianship. This person will be the primary driver behind the process of answering questions regarding information architecture, outlined below. Once the questions are answered, the subject specialist will be responsible for putting the answers into practice through data-entry. The subject specialist will need to articulate sets of facets and terms, select information resources, and enter everything into the system accordingly.

Other people

None of the people and skills outlined above are more important than the other. Each are equally necessary for a successful implementation. At the same time you might consider supplementing your team with people with more specialized skills such as:

• relational database design and implementation
• indexing techniques
• advanced XML applications and XSLT programming
• conducting surveys and doing statistical analysis
• facilitating focus group interviews and usability studies
• creating and maintaining controlled vocabularies
• doing large volumes of data-entry and maintenance

Computer hardware

Computer hardware/software and time are the necessary resources for the team to complete their implementation. The hardware/software requirements for implementing the “next generation” library catalog are directly proportional to the scope of the project. This particular implementation suggests purchasing a computer with as much RAM, CPU’s, and hard disk space that $10,000 can buy and use to run Linux, a relational database, and an indexer.

Time

Time is by far the most expensive resource necessary to fully implement the “next generation” library catalog. Time will need to be allocated in a number of ways. First of all, time will need to be spent allowing the team members to actually become a team. Many people think this process is too “touchy-feely”. On the other hand, the sooner the team establishes norms of behavior, decides how to build consensus, and learns how to work with each other the more quickly your implementation will come to fruition.

Second, time will need to be spent answering the questions of information architecture. On the surface this too appears to be a lot of “navel gazing” but time spent addressing these issues will uncover hidden assumptions, help you set priorities, outline the problems “next generation” library catalog is expected to address, and build relationships with your patrons. While this work does not produce a whole lot of tangible results, the result forms the entire foundation of your implementation.

Finally, time will need to be spent doing the work normally associated with the implementation of computer technology. Setting up hardware and software. Writing and/or configuring computer programs. Customizing interfaces to meet your specific needs. Filling the system with data. Maintaining the data. Evaluating success. Repeating the entire process. Here again, remember that any computer implementation consists of 20% computer work and 80% people work.

2. Answer questions regarding information architecture

At its core, information architecture is about users, context, and content. By answering questions regarding these issues the “next generation” library catalog will not only be functional, but it will be understandable to the intended audience, serve a meaningful purpose, and contain relevant content. Once you answer the questions regarding users, context, and content, write down the answers. Use them as guidelines for a specific period of time (at least one year), and then regularly revisit the guidelines.

Users

The first step in designing an information architecture is answering questions regarding users. You need to define the primary audience of your information system, build relationships with them, and learn what they need and desire.

Defining your information system’s primary audience is easier than you may think. In a private university like Notre Dame, the primary audience includes the University’s students, faculty, and staff. The needs of these people take precedence over the needs of the general public, alumni, or scholars from other institutions. There are limited resources (time and money) allotted to the implementation of your information system, and it is not possible to be all things to all people.

After defining who your audience is, you need to establish inter-personal relationships with them. No, you don’t have to become their best buddy, but you do need to build rapport to learn their expressed needs and desires. You need to learn and, more importantly, understand the challenges and difficulties they are having when it comes to doing their work. By building relationships with your primary audience you will learn these priorities and be able to focus your resources on making them easier to accomplish.

Context

The next step in articulating an information architecture is to answer questions regarding context. What is the purpose of your “next generation” library catalog, how does it fit within the totality of your institution’s products and services, and what sorts of resources (time and money) are allotted to the system’s development and maintenance?

Your “next generation” library catalog will not exist in a vacuum. It will be a reflection of its hosting institution, and in order for the information system to reflect well you will need to know the goals and priorities of your institution. For example, you need to know the purpose of the hosting institution. What problems is it trying to solve? How can your information system be expected to contribute to the solutions? Look to your institution’s mission statement for answers. Here at Notre Dame the library’s role is to help the students, faculty and staff of the University community do their learning, teaching, and scholarship.

The context of your “next generation” library catalog will also be tempered by the amount of resources allotted to its development and maintenance. These resources take the form of time, money, hardware, software, people, and expertise. The implementation and ongoing maintenance of your information system will require a diverse set of skills. None of which are necessarily more important than the other. The people with the necessary skills include subject experts, leaders of people, graphic designers, people who can mark up texts, knowledge workers who can organize content, usability experts, marketers, programmers, and systems administrators. The amount of time and energy these sorts of people can bring to the implementation of your information system is directly proportional to what your information system will enable people to do and do well.

Content

The third step in the creation of your information architecture is defining what content it will contain. This is akin to articulating a collection development policy.

Not even Google provides access to the totality of the world’s content, and there is no reason to expect you to fill this role. Instead, focus on the answers regarding users and content to define the scope of your content. Ask yourself, “What are the strengths of my institution?” “To what degree does my collection need to be comprehensive, authoritative, up-to-date, written in a particular language, presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner, etc?” In other words, create a list of guidelines that your information resources need to embody in order to be a part of your collection. Just because a particular information resource is about a particular subject does not necessarily mean it is a good candidate.

3. Conduct surveys, focus group interviews, and usability studies

Doing information interviews, focus group interviews, and usability studies allows you to build relationships with your intended audience, and there are many ways to go about this.

Surveys

Surveys are the first thing that come to mind. They are relatively inexpensive. They can touch large numbers of people, and they are good for answering “what” types of questions. “What is your age?” “What do you like and what do you dislike about our present information system?” “If you could change one thing, what would it be?” The answers to survey questions often need to be short and succinct; few people are going to give you a lot of detail while answering survey questions. The results of surveys usually manifest themselves numerically and then get converted into graphs. Along the lines of surveys are log file analysis. By looking at the statistics captured by your staff as well as your present information systems, you will get an idea of what your audience uses. People will often say one thing and act differently. Log files help put this behavior into perspective.

Focus group interviews

The other side of surveys are focus group interviews, structured communication sessions used to learn about your audience’s feelings. When compared to surveys, focus group interviews require a greater degree of interpersonal skills on the part of a facilitator. They touch fewer people than surveys and therefore are often times seen as more expensive. On the other hand, focus group interviews answer questions surveys don’t answer, specifically “why” questions. “Why do you like this service as opposed to another?” “Why do you think it is important to for us to implement such and such feature?” “Why do you spend your time working in this particular manner?” Just like surveys, the focus group interview process ranges from the simplistic to the complex. It can be as simple as a one-on-one chat over coffee, or it can be as elaborate as a meeting of six to twelve homogeneous people who answer questions in a moderated setting by a professional facilitator.

Usability studies

Finally, there are usability studies. Few people like to conduct usability studies because this is where the inadequacies of their systems become most apparent.

Usability studies are used to test the functionality and inherent usefulness of your system. The process of conducting usability studies is not elaborate. First you will want to create a list of tasks you expect end-users to be able to accomplish using your site. Traditional tasks for a “next generation” library catalog will include something like “Find and print three scholarly articles on the topic of AIDS in third world countries.” or “What is the call number of the book entitled Megatrends by John Naisbitt?” For each usability test there should be no more than five or six tasks to accomplish.

The next step is to have a handful of people try to do the tasks. The general consensus of the professional usability community is that you only need five or six testers. Sit them down. Emphasize that they are not being tested but the system. Watch the people do the tasks. Ask them to think out loud. Observer their behavior and do you best to record it.

After conducting the tests you will see what worked and what didn’t work. You will be surprised. What you thought was intuitive turns out to be library jargon. What you thought was important turns out to be irrelevant to their needs. At the same time understand it is unrealistic to expect 100 percent of your users to be able to do 100 percent of your tasks. Nobody and no system are perfect. Take what you have observed to heart and make a sincere effort to resolve the problem.

4. Create/maintain the “next generation” library catalog

The following sections describe in more detail the process of creating and maintaining the database/index combination.

Add/update/delete content from the database

Assuming that any type of XML file can be added to the “next generation” library catalog, identify and collect the desired data. Examples will include MODS (MARC) records describing the things in traditional library catalogs. Other examples will include EAD files from archives, the full-text of journal articles in the form of XHTML files, and TEI documents. Additionally, consider harvesting content from OAI data repositories, packaging up the resulting Dublin Core elements, and creating RDF files. Extremely rudimentary XML files with only two elements (title and body) can be created from plain text documents.

For each type of XML file used as input, write routine that stores the file to the database and supplements the record with facet/term combinations. These facet/term combinations are intended to denote they type of XML being stored as well as other characteristics of the information resource. Is it a book, a journal, or an article. Is it freely available or licensed to a particular community. Is it electronic or borrowable. Etc.

During this ingesting process it might be necessary to do a bit of data normalization, but that should be kept to a minimum because such a process is not necessarily scalable nor cost-effective.

Index the content of the database

Make the content of the database searchable by indexing it.

On a regular basis query the database for new data or all the data of a particular kind. Determine the type of XML used to describe or embody the information resource and extract its most important characteristics based on the patron’s point of view. This information will be embodied as the native XML elements. To the best of your ability, map these elements to (extended) Dublin Core element names (title, creator, description, subject, identifier, etc.). The use of the native XML elements will allow for specific searches. Dublin Core pseudonyms will make the system easier to use and provide global searching.

At this point it will be a good idea to consider supplementing the record with terms from controlled vocabularies and authority lists. This also might be a good time to statistically determine the “aboutness” of the record using techniques like TF-IDF. The addition of these controlled terms and calculated phrases will improve precision and recall during the search process.

Feed the indexer the necessary content. This includes the native XML element name/value pairs associated with Dublin Core labels, the facet/term combinations supplementing the XML, plus the full-text of the XML record itself. By doing so the indexer will facilitate fielded as well as full-text searching.

Implement searchable/browsable interfaces

After the index is generated, create a dictionary and thesaurus from the words found in the index. At the very least the dictionary will support features such as Did You Mean? by providing alternative spellings to words. The thesaurus will enable users with one way to Find More Like This One. Consider supplementing the most significant words in the dictionary with definitions. Search results can return these definitions and the system can be used as a dictionary. Put the names of people and places from your authority lists in the dictionary and supplement them with freely available biographies and encyclopedia articles. Consider enhancing the thesaurus with words from your controlled vocabulary and phrases important to your local community. The maintenance of the dictionary and thesaurus are opportunities for traditional technical services staff with cataloging and classification expertise.

The interface to the “next generation” library catalog is essentially search (because it is an index) supplemented by browse. Implement at least three types of search interfaces:

1. Simple – This is the one box, one button “Googlesque” interface expected by so many people.
2. Advanced – This is the many boxes, and many buttons approach to search. Query-by-example. Here the user will be able to limit by this, that, and the other thing and employ Boolean operators in order to create a more focused query.
3. Power – This interface allows the user to enter command-like searches. Few people really enjoy these types of searches because they require a knowledge of the underlying system’s underlying (CQL) syntax, but the expressiveness of such languages often returns very precise results.

By default, search results will be returned in relevancy ranked order, but this can be overridden by the user allowing the results to be sorted by author, title, date, popularity, etc.

The Suggestion Widget
	The Suggestion Widget is an AJAX-enabled graphical slider associated with lists of alternative spellings and possible synonyms derived from previously entered search terms. As the slider is moved higher and lower the number of suggestions visibly increases and decreases.

Supplement the search results with functions from the dictionary and thesaurus. Recommend alternative searches based on similarly spelled words or thesaurus terms. Provide a way to increase or decrease the suggestion factor through the use of something like the Suggestion Widget.

Make it easy to “drill down” into search results by allowing the user to select facet/term combinations or author names from a sidebar. Provide a graphical view of the search results illustrating where large groupings of items reside.

Save queries during the user’s session and allow them to be combined with each others or supplemented with additional queries. Allow people to do things with entire search results such as save them for future reference, used as part of a current awareness service, sent to an email address, or transformed into a bibliography using a particular bibliographic style.

Implement services against individual items

As end-users identify specific items of interest from search/browse process, implement services against those items and discover what those services are through OpenURL.

Each item in the search results will, at the very least, be associated with some sort of title and an identifier (key) from the underlying database. This information (as well as the identity of the end-user) can be repackaged as an OpenURL and submitted to a resolver. The resolver will look up the item in the “next generation” library catalog’s database and generate a list services that can be applied against the item. This list of services will be based on things like the format of the information resource, the richness of its XML representation, the policies of hosting library, and privileges of the requester. Some of these services may be simply the display of detailed information regarding the item such as a MARC view, its call number, or availability for borrowing. Other services may be more interactive such as download, Find More Like This One, email, read/write review, email the author, save for future reference, etc. With additional computing power and know-how other more advanced and time-saving services could be implemented such as summarize this article, compare this article to others previously selected, get a list of people who have read this time and allow me to contact them, “tag” the item as in “folksonomies”, annotate the item, etc.

Again, the “next generation” library catalog is not really a catalog but a tool enabling people to get information work done. The services of the “next generation” library catalog facilitate this process.

5. On a daily basis go to Step #4

As long as there is content useful to the library’s primary audience there is a need to maintain the database, index, and user interfaces. Go to Step #4 everyday.

6. On a quarterly basis go to Step #3

Like the building of library collections and the provision of library reference services, software is never done, and it needs to be continually assessed. Go to Step #3 at least once every three months.

7. On an annual basis go to Step #1

Time, money, and people with the necessary skill are a limited resource. There will be a need to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the “next generation” library catalog compared to the library’s parent organization. If proven effective, then the allocated resources “next generation” library catalog will need to be re-allocated. Go to Step #1 at least on an annual basis.

The full text of this document formatted as a single HTML page is available at:

http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/ngc/

Conclusion

This is a very exciting time in Library Land. Never before has there been so much accessible content. Never before has there been so much computing power available at such low costs. Never before has there been such an overwhelming need from people for data and information. As long as the library profession does not limit itself to thinking about books, then what more could a librarian ask for?

The “next generation” library catalog is intended to be an evolutionary development. It is expected to build on the work already done by the library community, supplemented by the expertise of computer scientists, and driven by the expressed needs of library users. Libraries have often been described as the heart of colleges and universities. This was true because they contained the majority of the data and information needed to do learning, teaching, and scholarship. With the advent of globally networked computers used to create information “born digital” there has been a shift away from books towards smaller bits of electronic information. The “next generation” library catalog is a tool designed to fit into this shifting environment and move librarianship into a more active role when it comes to increasing the sphere of knowledge.

The increasing availability of Voice of over IP (VoIP) is making it easier to communicate with people all over the world in real time.

Email is nice, and it has a number of advantages over the use of telephones. For example, because email is essentially a form of the written word, it allows you to communicate with many people across great distances of time and space. It is good for sharing detailed information. It is of sort of permanent because it is fixed in writing. On the other hand, real time voice communication can often be more efficient and communication things through tonal inflections that get lost in writing. With the increasing availability of VoIP technology (such as through the use of Skype) we might see increasing collaboration across nations because communication processes will be enhanced.

Web pages in the form of blogs and wikis are becoming the norm as opposed to the exception.

Increasingly I see the technology of blogs and wikis being used to form the home pages and supporting pages websites. These technologies, while each having their own particular syntax for content creation, only require a Web browser to use. This eliminates operating system and file transfer technicalities and at the same time eliminates much of issues surrounding look & feel. Blogs and wikis are relatively easy to use. Unfortunately, much like data-base driven websites, these things make preservation and archiving difficult because the content is literally joined with underlying database applications. At the same time, things like RSS/RDF used by blogs and wikis make syndication easier. There is no perfect, real-world solution to anything.

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are forms of communication, identify formulation, and benign exhibitionism.

Most of us like to see our names in print. (Just think of the results of the scholarly communications process!) Late adolescence is a time when people increasingly ask themselves “Who am I and how do other people see me?” Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook make it easy to address these issues on a global scale. They are real communities fraught with the same advantages and disadvantages of any other community, just magnified to a greater degree. Libraries are always a part of communities whether the community be a family, a neighborhood, a municipality, a business, a college or university, a state, or a nation. Being a part of communities such as MySpace and Facebook might be something libraries should consider.

The ideas forming the core of open source software are slowly leaking into other domains including science and government.

I draw your attention to the June and upcoming July issues of First Monday (firstmonday.org) where participants from all over the world examined and discussed all things open. I was particularly impressed with the way the concepts of open source software were being applied to areas of science. Along with the sharing of articles describing the outcomes of research, the data used to do analysis are being shared as well. This sort of openness makes for more transparency and better science. Transparent government is generally seen as a good thing too, and because of the Internet more things are be easily shared regarding government.

Meta-search is not living up to expectations, and I assert this is because it is based on poor technological assumptions.

The users of DIALOG (remember?) wanted metasearch and the best DIALOG could come up was a metasearch of its “blue pages.” Z39.50 was originally designed as a protocol for search. The ability to search multiple databases/indexes simultaneously was an add-on feature that never really came to fruition. These technologies failed to live up to their expectations because each of the underlying databases/indexes embodied their own particular information schemas designed to meet the needs of their own particular domains. When brought together these databases/indexes lost their richness. Metasearch fails for the same reasons. Not everybody implements Z39.50 in the same way. SRW/U do not dictate particular element names in their returned data sets. Screen scraping is just plain o’ dumb. Just as there is no over-arching metadata schema that satisfies every domain (Dublin Core and/or MODS come closest), metasearch fails because it is not able to amalgamate such a wide variety of content. Metasearch is a Holy Grail.

Mass digitization will change aspects of librarianship.

As the content of libraries is mass digitized there will be a greater shift towards services and away collections. When content is mass digitized and freely available on the ‘Net the questions regarding libraries will be less about “Do you have this, that, or the other thing?” and more about “What can you do for me to make this content more meaningful and useful?” While it might seem efficient in terms of disk space and authenticity to centrally store data and information, the local ownership of data and information facilitates preservation and manipulation. “Lot’s of copies keep stuff safe.” As people create their own collections, and as these collections are increasing malleable because they are digital, people will expect to use the content in new and different ways. Find similar content. Find content contradicting this idea. Trace this idea forwards and backwards. Pretty-print this document. Index and provide search against all my content. Etc. If everybody has the content, then what is the role of library? The provision of services against library content are an area of great opportunity.

Licensed content and digital resource management (DRM) schemes are not going away, but neither is open access.

Copyright is designed to encourage and spread the fruits of the useful arts. Instead it has been exploited by corporations (middlemen) who aggregate these fruits and redistribute them to the masses. People want to be recognized for their accomplishments. This is true for the artist as well as the scientist. At the same time the I believe the more authentic, passionate, and productive artists and scientists would produce their same fruits if copyright were not to exist. What are they going to say? “No, I’m not going to paint this painting or write that song because someone might steal it.” “No, I’m not going to invent that cure for AIDS because I might not be rewarded accordingly.” Furthermore there are a whole lot of great musicians and brilliant scientists out there, but they simply have not benefited from marketing and hype bestowed upon them by companies whose goal is to make money, not necessarily to improve the human condition. Licensed content and DRM systems are manifestations of such an environment. These will co-exist with open access content because of the accessibility of ‘Net. The ‘Net will provide its own sort of peer-review and short-circuit some of the issues surrounding copyright and DRM. As the folks at Google say, “On the ‘Net democracy works.”

There is a growing discontent with the library catalogs.

From a user’s point of view, library catalogs are notoriously difficult to use. Too many options. Too time consuming to get the materials. It only contains books. Similarly, the overwhelming multitude of available bibliographic indexes makes it difficult to find “just a few good articles.” In this environment Google and Google Scholar come to the rescue pretty quickly. As I have read in numerous OCLC reports, and as I have heard from Google executives, people know libraries contain large quantities of authoritative information, but ease of access and convenience trump such qualities in a heart beat. The venerable library catalog needs to evolve. Yes, there is need to know what is physically available from a library but more importantly people need to acquire and use content for their learning, teaching, and research activities that goes beyond library collections. In a networked environment where physical location is not as much of a limitation, library catalogs need to go beyond inventory control systems for librarians to information tools for students, instructors, and scholars. The content of the catalog needs to expand. It needs to be designed more for users and less for librarians. It needs to become an empowering and enabling technology instead of an impediment.

The cataloging process is moving from complete and full to good enough because full-text indexing and automatic classification is less expensive.

Traditional cataloging is expensive. The amount of content that needs to be cataloged is increasing. The number of times cataloging records need to be edited because of the more dynamic nature of digital content is also increasing. There is an increasing amount of full-text available to libraries. Automatic, machine-generated metadata creation techniques is much less expensive and requires much fewer people. All of these things are lending themselves to creating “good enough” records as opposed to high-quality, very detailed records. By no means is anyone saying that the cataloging process is useless. Researchers in the application of digital libraries acknowledge the need for things like MARC(XML) and MODS, ontologies (a.k.a. controlled vocabularies), and metadata in general. On the other hand, the creation and maintenance of these things without the exploited use of computers is too expensive and not scalable. “How big is your backlog of original cataloging that needs to be done?”

OCLC is continuing to expand and redefine itself.

Mr. Fred Kilgour’s legacy in OCLC is alive and well. I had the opportunity to share an office with him for a number of months while I was a clinical instructor in the library school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At that time I was going to give Mr. Kilgour all sorts of grief about weird searching syntax (“4221″, etc.). Instead I discovered a man who was combining information science with traditional bibliography. He told me was sad because he thought all the exciting things were still to come, and he said this ten years ago even though he didn’t use email. As an individual Mr. Kilgour has slowed down but the institution he created continues to grow. It supports traditional librarianship while investigating new ways to provide data and information service. Lorcan Dempsey, who leads OCLC’s research efforts, and his team always have fun and interesting things to explore. OCLC’s acquisition of RLG and Openly Informatics will bring additional strengths to the system. I just can’t figure out why OCLC doesn’t try to provide open source software library application support for a fee.

–
Eric Lease Morgan
June 18, 2006 (Father’s Day)

This essay outlines two opportunities for the library profession: 1) the increased need for library services and not necessarily library collections, and 2) the ability to be leaders in the implementation of services through in-house software development.

Collections and services

Librarianship, especially in an environment of globally networked computers, is not so much about collections as it is about the combination of collections and services. It is no good having one without the other.

Computers can store enormous amount of data and information. (Whether or not they can store knowledge or wisdom is an essay for another time.) There are an enormous amounts computers in the world, and an enormous number of those computers are connected to each other through the Internet. By extension, there is an enormous amount of information available to anybody with a Web browser and an Internet connection.

This enormous amount of information is essentially a collection. No, it is not necessarily organized. No, it is not necessarily owned by your library. But it is a collection, albeit a very very large one. Access to this collection is not so much of an issue as it is making use of the collection. “What do I do with all of this information?” “How do I use it?” If I work in an academic environment, the question might more specifically be, “How do I effectively use this access to do my work — my teaching, learning, and scholarship?”

What do people do with data and information once they acquire it? Answers are not so difficult to articulate. People read it. They file it. They organize it. They annotate it. They share it with their friends and colleagues. They delete it. They edit it. They save it for future reference. They print it. They integrate it into other activities. They compare it to other pieces of data and information. They validate it. On and on and on. All of these things could be called services applied against their collections. Some of these services are natural extensions of traditional librarianship. Thus, here are opportunities for growth of the library profession — the creation and maintenance of information services. As more and more people have access to information and as more and more people can carry huge amounts of information around with them on their keychains and their iPods, the problem is not so much about access to collections. Collections are easily accessible, especially after they’ve been digitized. Think Google Print. The problem is what to do with the information to accomplish my work.

With the increasing number of library-like institutions providing library-like services, it is important for libraries to differentiate themselves. Libraries need to adapt to the changing environment of networked information and changing user expectations. Libraries need to grow beyond the the creation and maintenance of collections. Everybody creates collections. Everybody has collections. Everybody provides access to collections. Collections abound. Providing services against the collections ensures the collections have utility. Here is need to be filled, and building on the profession’s knowledge of the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of centralized information I believe we can discover, improve, and implement these processes against the collections of individuals. These things are called “services”, and they will empower people and make them more productive.

I believe a Zen Master once said, “Collections without services are useless, and services without collections are empty.”

In-house software development

In order to provide rich sets of information services against collections it will be necessary to implement those services in a computerized environment. This is much of what the user will expect. If we decide to be leaders in this area — the creation and maintenance of services, then we, as a profession need to learn how to control the computer environment as opposed to being controlled by it. Through in-house software development libraries can achieve this goal.

No I am not suggesting every librarian be a computer programmer, but I am suggesting the profession become more knowledgeable of basic information technologies as implemented through the use of computers. Relational database are a good example. Librarians love to create lists. List of books. Lists of journals. Lists of Internet resources. In a computerized environment these lists are currently best implemented in relational database systems, yet most of the profession can not articulate what this means and differentiate it with a spreadsheet.

Another example is searching. “Librarians love to search. Everybody else loves to find.” Searching, in today’s computer environment, is best implemented through the use of an indexer. Indexers extract all the words from documents, creates a list of the words and their positions in the documents, and then associates each word with one or more documents where the word can be found. Computer-generated indexes work just exactly like back-of-the-book indexes except every word, not just the words a human thought were important, is listed. There are many indexers available for use. By learning how to use them we can make things searchable. Why don’t we as librarians know more about this technology and create more of our own indexes? There sure is enough content available for indexing.

The profession does not need to learn how to create new relational database systems, nor does it need to invent new indexers. We missed that boat almost twenty years ago. Instead the profession needs to learn how to use and “glue” these applications together, and that process is called computer programming. We need to learn how to use and combine databases and indexers together in order to build collections and implement services.

“Ah,” you say, “I don’t need to know about these things because I have vendors supply this for me.” Yes, that might be true, but such an approach to the situation is expensive in terms of time. It is not possible for third party commercial institutions to create solutions quickly enough for librarians to be seen as leaders in the field and to expediently satisfy local needs. On the other hand, if libraries posses the skills to write computer programs — control their computer environment — then they will be empowered to create solutions more immediately and more specifically. How comfortable are you outsourcing your collection, reference, or cataloging operations? In today’s environment computing services are no different.

No, I do not advocate not taking advantage of vendor-supplied solutions to library problems; there is a definite need for such things. At the same time I do advocate a greater degree of computing expertise in libraries. Would you trust a carpenter who did not know how to exploit the use of a hammer? Would you trust a surgeon who was not an expert in the use of a scalpel? Why should you trust a librarian, especially a librarian working in a computerized environment, who did not know how to expertly use a computer?

–
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame

Food for thought.

Someone wrote:

> Anyway, I am seeking your advice. I am very hungry to move from my
> reference position into a systems related position, preferably one
> that centered on web application development for libraries….
>
> Can you offer any advice?

I can afford lots o’ advice, and I’m always to help out in these regards.

I sincerely believe librarianship is overflowing with opportunities for people who want to exploit the use of computers to facilitate library-like activities. While it is difficult to ignore the changes in Library Land with the advent of the globally networked computers — the Internet, I do not think libraries will be disappearing. Certainly the processes of librarianship (collecting, organizing, archiving, and disseminating data and information for the purposes of increasing knowledge and understanding) are still needed and desirable by all sorts of communities. Put another way, there are plenty of opportunities for librarians who want to apply the use of computers to traditional library tasks.

There are five technologies, listed in priority order, I suggest you spend time learning in order to increase your skill set:

1) XML – XML is a sort of modern-day alchemy. It represents a way to turn data into information, as well as a way to unambiguously transmit that information from one computer to anther computer. Take the following string of characters: 1776. It is just an integer. It has no context. One thousand seven hundred and seventy-six what? By marking up the integer in an agreed upon fashion, say 1776, the integer takes on a new meaning. It has value and thus it becomes information. Magic. Since the syntax for marking up XML is simple and agreed upon, there are many communities (government, business, academia, etc.) who use tools to read and use XML information. This represents a giant opportunity for the library community.

All you need to learn about XML is a plain-text editor and a relatively modern Web browser such as Firefox. Mark-up, by hand, things like electronic texts. Associate them with (CSS or XSLT) stylesheets. Process them with an XML processing application like a Web browser, and you end up with human-readable information. No programming. Just information and display.

Attached is an example I was working on yesterday. The XML file is the search results against an SRU-accessible index. The XSL file transforms the XML into HTML and displays it. Save both the XML and XSL file in the same directory, and then open the XML file with Firefox (or some other ‘modern’ Web browser) to see what I mean.

2) Relational databases – Libraries love lists. We maintain lists of books, journals, Internet resources, authority files, controlled vocabulary terms, etc. In an electronic environment lists are best created and maintained using relational databases. Learn how to design, create, and maintain relational databases using the lingua franca of relational database technology — SQL (Structured Query Language). There are many relational databases applications to explore. Microsoft Access. Filemaker Pro. MySQL. Postgres. Access is widely supported in the desktop environment. Filemaker is cross- platform, has a great interface, exports XML, and includes an integrated HTTP (Web) server. Postgres is very standards compliant but technologically a bit challenging. MySQL is widely popular but comes with little or no interface.

If you have access (no puns intended) to Filemaker, then I suggest it first, simply for the interface. Second, I suggest MySQL. It will install nicely on your desktop as well as server computer. Get a book like Databases for Mere Mortals in order to become familiar with the SQL language and normalization techniques. Learn the huge difference between “flat files” and real databases.

Excel and tab-delimited files are not “real” database applications!

3) Indexing – Believe it or not, databases suck as facilitating search, especially considering today’s user expectations regarding relevance ranking. In order to search a (relational) database queries must be applied against specific fields; relational databases do not support free text searching. Databases can fake it by applying queries to many fields, but this gets overly complicated very quickly. Furthermore, relational databases do not have the facility to rank search results according to some statistical analysis; relational databases can only sort results numerically or alphabetically.

Indexers overcome these problems. Indexers read sets of documents, break them up into their atomistic parts (words), and write these parts to a file along with a pointer back to the original document. Searches are then applied to these lists. They work exactly like the back-of-book indexes except all of the words in documents are included, not just the one’s a human thought were important.

To learn about indexing get a program called swish-e. Then acquire bunches of HTML or XML documents and save them in a directory. Turn swish-e loose on the directory to create an index. Use swish-e to search the resulting index. As your experience matures you will learn how to write reports against your database, pipe it to your indexer, and search your database that way. Either way, you will end up with a much more powerful search interface when compared to the use of SELECT statements in SQL.

Databases and indexing are two sides of the same information retrieval coin.

4) Web serving – Increasingly people expect to acquire the information the require for learning, teaching, and research through a Web browser. In order to meet these expectations libraries need to host Web (HTTP) servers.

Believe it or not, this is really easy. Get a copy of Apache, install it on any Internet-accessible computer, and start filling it up with stuff. You do not need a big bad computer for this, and I challenge you to fill it up with so much stuff that it becomes too slow. (Actually, the challenge here will be putting into practice the principles of good information architecture. Specifically asking and then answering questions regarding the context, content, and users of your server.) When your server gets full you will have learned a whole lot and be ready to go to the next step.

5) Programming/scripting – Finally, you will want to “glue” all of the above technologies together into a coherent whole. You will want streamline the data-entry and reporting processes. You will want these process to run regularly and automatically. You will want graphical user interfaces to your XML data, relational databases, searching functionality, etc.

To make this happen you will need to write computer programs. I prefer Perl, but just about any computer language will do. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Java is probably on your desktop computer. Perl is particularly strong for manipulating texts. PHP is particularly adept at Web applications. Programming requires a person to think very systematically — almost mathematically. The programmer must understand the step-by-step processes required of a system. There are no leaps of comprehension in computer programs. Computer programing is keen on syntax (as XML is), but once that syntax is mastered real productivity occurs. (Ironically, marking up cataloging records using AACR II requires similar skills and attention to detail.)

Finally, as far as I know, I do not think there are very many accrediting agencies teaching these skills to any great degree. Our profession is aging quickly and there is not a critical mass of library practitioners who can apply these technologies as well as understand the principles of librarianship. At the same time, the processes of librarianship, with the possible exception of archiving, can be closely associated with the technologies outlined above:

* collection – XML, databases, and programming
* organization – XML, databases, HTTP servers, and programming
* preservation – XML (maybe)
* dissemination – XML, indexing, HTTP servers, and programming

Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend themselves better to server-class operating systems such a Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is challenging in itself and not readily applicable to librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the desire to learn, and the time to do it.

Good luck, and I hope this helps.

–
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame

August 7, 2005

This is a list of my Top Technology Trends for the 2005 ALA Annual Meeting.

1. Live CD’s and massive storage devices are increasingly making the CPU of computers commodity resources.

The bootable massive storage devices such as live CD’s or USB drives are enabling people to carry their entire computing environment around with them without the need of a network. Imagine what will happen when a person can carry around the equivalent of the Library of Congress on a key fob. What will libraries look like at that time?

2. Web Services, a technique of disseminating XML data over the Web, are playing an increasingly important role in the dissemination of data and information.

Expect the component parts of integrated library systems to be parsed out as individual Web Services. Expect the functions of things like dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopedias to be disseminated using Web Service techniques and combined into new and innovate interfaces usable in many environments and available on many computing devices. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) is an example of such a technique. It enables the creation of Web-based scripts to appear stateful and consequently enable the developer to create environments holding people’s attention longer. Apple Computer’s “popularization” of Konfabulator, known as Dashboard Widgets, is another example.

3. We are increasingly seeing commercial and non-commercial information be accessible side-by-side.

The principles of Open Access publishing and Open Source software are very similar. They are both about providing free access to data, information, and knowledge for the benefit of people everywhere. One will not supplant the other. Support both in order to hedge your bets and continue to remain relevant.

4. The preservation of digital materials is a pressing problem.

We are in the midst of creating a Digital Dark Age. Libraries are about the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of data, information, and knowledge. Increasingly this data, information, and knowledge is manifested in digital form. What are we doing to preserve this content? How will people five, ten, fifty, or hundred years from now going to access to this content? While I do not advocate the preservation of all digital content, there is a need to articulate collection policies regarding it and then implementing the policies. I suggest the preservation of locally produced content be the first priority. Consider the markup of content in XML and the use of LOCKSS as potential solutions.

5. You can decreasingly expect people to come to your website for content.

Instead, explore ways to integrate your content and services into the working environments of you patrons. Playing a role in institution-wide portal applications is one example. Create Search Bar tools for Firefox browsers. Explore the use of XUL to create institution-specific interfaces to collections and services. Syndicate your content, and develop tools — gadgets/widgets — providing seamless access to you, your content, and your services from within the user’s browser, email client, and RSS reader.

6. Customization is not going away, and gathering personal information is not necessary for personalization.

Google News and Yahoo News are expect examples. At the same time, more and more you see things like Remember Me buttons on commercial sites while logging on. For the most part things like People Like You Also Used and You Might Also Be Interested In are appreciated services. These functions make content providers “sticky.” Balance your professional values for patron privacy with the usability of your Web presence. Strive to create the best mix of professionalism and user expectations.

–
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame

June 16, 2005