The Digital Librarian

Oregon State University’s Library continues to impress with it’s web presence. This morning I discovered they are providing a mobile version of their web presence. Check out the announcement on their main web page and the very nice Mobile Libraries page they have put up – and if you have a mobile device, try out the mobile version.

(NOTE: One thing that is missing is a mobile search. Since Oregon State runs LibraryFind, and since LibraryFind has a mobile version, I anticipate that this might be added sometime in the near future)

Here are the steps I went through to install Django on Mac OSX Leopard:

First, I followed the steps on this page to get IDLE support (which I may or may not use, but I figured couldn’t hurt).

I then downloaded the latest official version from http://www.djangoproject.com/download/

and followed the instructions for installing from the tarball.

And that seemed to work. The tutorial works fine – I can create a new project and run a development web server. I can synchronize the database using SQLite3. However, when I try switching to MySQL, I get some nasty errors when running ‘python manage.py syncdb’. So, I found this page, which gives the precise steps needed to get python talking to MySQL correctly on Leopard.

After that, everything is apparently working! Not too horrible – just getting the MySQL connection working was a bit tricky, but otherwise, I’m now able to start working with Django.

OCLC has announced that it is moving forward with a strategy to provide most if not all of the services that current integrated library systems provide (i.e. circulation, acquisitions, license management, etc.). I won’t go into the details (you can read them yourself), but for a little more information beyond the official announcement, see Andrew Pace’s blog as well as Marshall Breeding’s.

As Marshall Breeding relates in his blog post, some will view this announcement with great applause, and others will be worried that OCLC may be moving into such a leveraged position within the library community that they will wield too much power and control. I happen to feel a bit of both; the timing is right for providing our traditional ILS functions as “Software as a Service” (SaaS) – this in essence is what OCLC is meaning when they talk about providing library management functions at the network level. OCLC and others should be moving in this direction, and it is to OCLC’s credit that they are indeed doing so. I will be interested to see how the current players in the ILS arena respond to OCLC’s intentions.

While I have many thoughts about the actual services OCLC proposes, the approach they are taking, and other bits related to technology (pun fully intended), I believe it is critical to come back to the issues surrounding OCLC’s proposed changes to its record use and transfer policy. There has already been much discussion and concern around the proposed changes; OCLC has slowed done the process of implementing what it originally proposed, and has now formed a review board to gather feedback as part of the process. My concern here is that this latest OCLC strategic announcement adds some very important context to how the proposed record use and transfer policy changes could affect the library community, and that a great deal of feedback has been provided to OCLC prior to this news. The prohibition in the latest record use policy on “commercial” transfer is broad and ill-defined; now that OCLC is extending its range of services into library management functions, the current records use / transfer policy could prohibit others from providing ILS functions that directly compete with OCLC’s offerings. If another company wants to provide network-level ILS functions, this could be interpreted as a commercial use of WorldCat records as per the new policy, as in essence a library would need to transfer their catalog records to that company’s network-level ILS services.

I am all for OCLC providing network-level services that support libraries, but I don’t believe it is in the library community’s best interests to relinquish control of our data to OCLC or any other single institution. We cannot afford an environment where our future is defined or controlled by a single entity. We need a robust technology ecosystem. To ensure a balanced playing field, we as a community need to not let OCLC dictate the policies of use of our catalog records; we need to let OCLC know that we believe it is our best interests for these records to be openly accessible and usable by all. And if OCLC decides to pursue a policy that does not reflect the wishes of the library community, then the library community should pursue appropriate legal actions if necessary to protect our interests and our data. While OCLC has been and continues to be a great steward of our records, these are not OCLC’s records, these are our records.

The latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal has an excellent article by David Tarrant et al detailing the use of OAI-ORE to enable the transferrence of repository objects from one repository solution to another. This, IMHO, is the first write-up of a compelling use case for OAI-ORE; the ability to migrate repository collections from one repository solution to another is critical in the long-term for most institutions, and having a standard mechanism for doing so would be a huge win. This is a must-read.

Last week I attended the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis. I look forward to CNI meetings, as generally the programs are quite strong and diverse – usually there are at least two or three sessions that I find extremely useful, and this time was no exception.

Clifford Lynch, the Executive Director of CNI, usually kicks things off with his views on technology and technology policy current events and trends. However, this time there was an opening plenary by David Rosenthal on digital preservation. I really enjoyed David’s talk, as he provided a good context to some important digital preservation work over the last 10-15 years, and though many of his conlcusions and opinions can be argued, I believe his main intent was to spark conversation and thinking, which I believe he did quite well. Usually when I hear someone speak about digital preservation, it is at a very technical, how-to level; David’s talk brought the level of conversation up a notch, at a level I felt bridged the philosophical and strategic with the hands-on pragmatic. One bit I found interesting about David’s talk is his promotion of open source software as a preservation strategy; while I agree that OSS can make preservation easier, I don’t know that OSS by itself guarantees the future ability to render or emulate a particular document format. However, again, David’s use of strong statements can be seen as a strategy for engaging a conversation about the topic, and more conversation at this level is needed.

A couple of sessions of note that I attended at this meeting. First, there was a very good session on Shared Leadership for Transforming Information Technology Organizations by representatives from the University of Minnesota. The University of Minnesota has engaged in a transformation process for supporting IT throughout the entire institution. The presenters, all from their central IT group (I am including their CIO’s office as part of central IT, though that may not be entirely accurate) talked about various aspects and challenges with their IT transformation process. UMN has something now called “The Common Good”, which are a group of centrally-supported services provided to the entire campus. In general, the services in the “Common Good” are mandated; in other words, if you are going to use email, and the Common Good provides the campus’ email service, your unit is mandated to use the email service in the common good (unless you go through a rigurous opt-out process that forces you to justify why you are opting out). By implementing the “Common Good”, UMN has been able to reduce overall IT spending from 6.55% of total expenditures in the institution to 6.39%. At the same time, individual units on campus reduced their IT expenditures from 4.14% to 3.6%. Overall, this has saved UMN $18 million a year. Another metric they stated was that units could show that for every dollar now spent on IT (via central services, I assume), they get two dollars worth of IT returned. I’d like to see some additional details about this last metric – if accurate, that’s a great measurement in support of their efforts. I would point you to their presentation, but unfortunately at this time it isn’t available from the CNI website.

The second session I would point out was on the Open Annotation Collaboration. This is an effort that is just getting underway – the intent is to explore how annotations can be standardized and work across scholarly systems. The project goals, specifically, are:

• To facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections. To this end, interoperability specifications will be devised.
• To demonstrate through implementations an interoperable annotation environment enabled by the interoperability specifications in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases.
• To seed widespread adoption by deploying robust, production-quality applications conformant with the interoperable annotation environment in ubiquitous and specialized services, tools, and content used by scholars — e.g.: Zotero, AXE, LORE, Co-Annotea, Pliny; JSTOR, AustLit, MONK.

Over the years, there have been a number of efforts that have looked at how to properly deal with digital annotations. This project is interesting because it appears that even the definition of annotation may be explored – for instance, when I think of an annotation, I think of some comment or note that is associated with a particular object. However, this effort is abstracting the idea of object to look at annotations of collections, compound objects, similar works, annotations of annotations, etc. In other words, they are in essance extending the definitional reach of the term. This approach is likely influenced by RDF and work on the OAI-ORE effort; my sense is that this particular project is in part a response to testing out the standards developed by OAI-ORE. As such (and even if I’m wrong on that), there should be some very interesting work produced through this research. The project website can be found at http://www.openannotation.org/.

Hopefully, the presentations from this CNI meeting will be made available soon on the CNI website, as there were a number of presentations I was unable to attend (one of the frustrations of the meeting having 8 concurrent tracks).

A couple of additional blog posts on the workshop – Maurice Vanderfeesten writes up his experience, with an identifiers focus, and Chris Rusbridge posts his take on the workshop.

JISC just held its annual one-day conference, this year in Edinburgh. There appears to be quite a few interesting sessions; luckily for those of us who didn’t attend, JISC has put out the audio (and with the keynotes, video) of the sessions, accompanied by PDF’s of the actual presentations.

Links to audio / video / PDF’s can be found at http://jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/03/jiscconference09/programme.aspx.

Also, there was quite an active bit of tweeting during the conference – you can go back and read the tweets via #jisc09.

Amsterdam Sign

This week I attend the JISC International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop (This workshop was also sponsored by DRIVER and the SURF Foundation) The goal of the workshop was to identify shared agendas for action and coordination between major national and international stakeholders, for the purpose of developing an international federated network of repositories.

This was truly a workshop – the majority of the time was spent in breakout groups, working on specific issues in building out an international repository infrastructure. The four topics addressed by the breakout groups (one per group) were the concept of an international repository organization, repository “handshake”, repository citations, and repostiory identifier infrastructure.

Outside of the working groups reporting out, there were two talks – the opening keynote was given by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project, and the closing keynote by Clifford Lynch of CNI. Norbert kicked off the workshop by providing some history and context; he described some of the history and activities which led to the aims of the workshop. While much of his talk focused on work from DRIVER, his intent was to describe the general needs for building an international federated network of repositories.

After the opening keynote, the majority of the next two days was spent in the working groups. I participated mainly in the organization working group (I initially joined the handshake group, but after the first break switched over to the organization group). My take on the breakout groups was that it took most of the groups some time to get a proper focus on their activities (as is often the case with a new group of people coming together), but that in the end, each group was able to get some reasonable outcomes. The most difficult discussion probably occured with the organization group; the first day’s discussions extended to a variety of topics and opinions as to why there needs to be an organization, what an organization would do, who would be in the organization, etc. The second day the group facilitators had the group role-play different stakeholders (such as repository managers, funders, etc.) and address a set of questions about what each group might want out of an organization. I think this approach worked better; it may not have led to a concensus opinion on the what’s, why’s, and how’s of the organization, but it did provide some concrete data that will be useful as the efforts to create a governing organization move forward.

At the end of day 2, each of the four breakout groups reported out on their outcomes. I must admit, I was fairly tired at the end of nearly two days of intense workshop activity, and my notes on these outcomes are rather minimal. However, there should be a workshop report posted in the near future on the workshop website. My take from the outcomes was that the citation and identifiers groups made the most progress. I especially liked the diagram created by the identifiers group, which can be viewed on a (new-to-me) service called prezi.com.

The workshop wrapped up with a closing keynote by Clifford Lynch. As usual, Clifford did a very good job of summing up the outcomes of the two days, and providing his thoughts as to the near-future challenges with repository efforts. One thing we need to keep in mind, as we look towards the role of the repository within digital libraries, is that our repositories not only need enhance the provisioning of access to scholarly information to our users, but they also need to provision access to other services, repositories or otherwise. The repository is not an ends to itself, but it is a component of a larger infrastructure. Finally, while we are still understanding how institutionally we can best implement repositories, it is clear that repositories are key to the future of libraries.

One of the nice things about this meeting was that there was an active backchannel discussion via Twitter. You can see this discussion (and see what others thought) by clicking on this link.

Amazon got it right – again. Today, they released a Kindle app for the iPhone, thereby allowing iPhone users to access Amazon’s eBook collection. This is big; iPhone owners were already reading eBooks on their devices using one of a variety of eBook reading applications available for the device. Now, Amazon can leverage the iPhone user base, and dramatically increase the number of potential purchasers of eBooks (clarification: customers for Amazon provided eBooks). When Amazon first came out with the Kindle, I was a bit surprised; I never figured Amazon as a device manufacturer. I still don’t see them as a device manufacturer, in the long term at least.

What I did see (and still do) was Amazon wanting to shore-up the eBook market in the same way Apple has led the online music sales business. Up until Amazon released the Kindle V.1, the leading eBook device was the Sony Reader. When Sony produced their Reader, they also created an eBook store where owners of the Reader could purchase content. My guess is that this really got Amazon’s attention. If there was a future in eBooks, wouldn’t the world’s largest traditional book retailer also want to be the world’s leading eBook retailer? And there was Sony, selling not only eBook hardware, but also getting into the eBook retail game. So, I imagine Amazon looked at Sony’s activities, and looked at Apple’s success with iTunes, and realized that they wanted to be to eBooks what Apple was to digital music, and to do that, they were going to need to push the eBook industry forward by creating a device; this device would also allow them to grab (or maintain, perhaps) the market lead in the eBook retail sector.

Coming back to the present, Amazon has done that. They probably exceeded their own expectations with the success of the Kindle 1.0. They were able to create an eBook ecosystem where their customers purchased content solely through Amazon. As Apple had done with digital music, Amazon was now doing with eBooks. But then, today, came the truly inspired strategy – they decided to leverage the success of the iPhone! Risky? Nope. Not only did they open up their catalog to iPhone owners, they also made sure their content could still only be used within a controlled environment, in this case software instead of hardware. Without conjecturing too much about profit margins and such, I’m willing to guess that Amazon is not making a lot of money on each Kindle; their real income stream is the content (I’m not sure what Apple’s balance is in terms of profit realized from ipod / iTouch / iPhone sales relative to content sold for those devices, but Apple has historically had very good profit margins on its hardware products), and Amazon is at heart a retailer, not a hardware vender. The more devices running Amazon eBook software equals more purchasers of Amazon eBooks.

I don’t see Amazon stopping with the iPhone. I see them cutting deals with other eBook manufacturers and other eBook-capable devices. And I think this is brilliant strategy on their part.

So, Libraries need to pay attention -  not because this will have a negative impact on libraries, because I don’t think it will. Libraries need to start paying attention because eBooks are now going to be big – very, very big. This doesn’t mean people will stop reading / purchasing / borrowing traditional books, but it does mean that we should expect to see a big increase in the use of eBooks and eBook content. And if I am correct, and we start to see the Amazon eBook application on additional devices, we will need to start paying very close attention to how our users interact with eBooks. The Kindle, while it has a nice display, has limited functionality outside of allowing a user to consume content. Might we start to see some additional functions showing up on devices that might be capable of more? Perhaps on the iPhone, we might see some touchscreen capabilities showing up, such as the ability to annotate. Perhaps, as e-Ink technology improves, and as additional devices support the Amazon eBook ecosystem, we’ll start to see more electronic textbooks, with not only static, but multimedia content imbedded within. And maybe, if the academic / research sector of the eBook market takes off, we might start to see a variety of scholarly support tools embedded in the Amazon eBook application, taking advantage of the hardware capabilities of the device on which it resides. As long as Amazon can maintain a significant marketshare in selling eBook content, they will have incentive to develop new features and capabilities to support use of their content, not just in a consumptive role, but in a more interactive mode as well. Gather, create, share(1), all on your iPhone, there’s a thought.

Another thought: Amazon will have this feature-forward incentive, as long as there continues to be enough competition in the general eBook ecosystem. If there is not robust competition, then Amazon’s financial incentive to increase functionality in their eBook software will diminish.

A final thought: Libraries provision access to information. We are now about to experience a rapid shift over the next 2-3 years in how many of our users consume book-length resources. How they interact with this content is going to change as well. We need to pay very close attention to these changing use patterns, so that we can understand how to support our users digital lifestyles. What we do isn’t changing; how we do it is. If we pay attention properly, we’ll create new and exciting service which support learning and research, regardless of how that content is acquired by our users.

1. “Gather, create, share” is a phrase credited to the extremely insightful Raymond Yee. But you probably already knew this.

Last week I attended the 3rd Global Research Libraries 2020 workshop, held this year in Taipai, Taiwan. GRL2020 is an event where the participants submit brief position papers (pdf) prior to the meeting, and then present and discuss their activities and ideas related to what research libraries might be in the year 2020. Previous instances of this workshop have been held in Europe and in the U.S.

The participants in this year’s workshop came from the U.S., Mexico, Taiwan, China, India, Japan, Australia, Germany, and Portugal. A fairly good, if not complete, global representation. As with many events, one of the big take-aways was getting to meet the other participants and to learn about their various projects and work. In fact, this was the best part of the workshop – while I was aware of a number of digital library efforts in the UK, Australia, and Europe, I was not familiar with the state of digital libraries in China, Taiwan, Japan, and India. What I learned is that digital libraries around the world are facing similar challenges in regards to information access and discovery, preservation, support of scholarship, and intellectual property.

(Most of the presentations are available from the website, and I highly recommend perusing them.)

One of the challenges with a 2-day workshop is finding an effective method of taking the combined knowledge of the participants and applying some focus to it to come up with actionable outcomes; I think this particular challenge presented itself at this year’s GRL 2020. Because of the wealth of knowledge and breadth of work presented, there was not much time for in-depth discussion activities. In hindsight (it is always easier to look back and critique), there probably needed to be more time devoted to break-out sessions for small group discussion. There were some interesting outcomes from previous iterations of the workshop, but I personally did not get a good sense of this year’s event extending on that work. That being said, with the number of presentations given in the workshop, it is hard to see where more discussion time could be had.

There will shortly be a post-workshop report that will be published to the website; I will write-up a post on that report once it is out. In the meantime, take a look at the position papers and presentations, as they are quite interesting and disseminate the unique and common problems our geographically distributed digital library communities face.