Digital Library Federation Forum

The Digital Library Federation Forum held Nov. 11-12 in Long Beach represented a radical change in format from the previous meetings. The resignation of the previous executive director prompted a re-evaluation of the goals of the organization. This edition of the forum, planned and led by our own Sayeed Choudhury, comprised an opening day of invited speakers and a second day of discussion and planning by two interest groups and by the forum as a whole. I have attended DLF for several years, but this was the most exciting one by far. I will report on one of the first day speakers and on the discussion of the Project Management Group.

Brad Wheeler, CIO and VP for IT at Indiana University, gave one of the most interesting and challenging talks about collaboration that I've seen in a while. He opened by stating his view of the two core challenges facing DLF:

• Will the behaviors of DLF participants yield solutions that matter for higher education as well as our own campuses?
• Will DLF members collaborate, cooperate, or pontificate? (we aren't going to win the latter--there are many others in higher education with much more experience)
  

Most universities and university libraries have tended to work on optimizing local services rather than develop services that matter across higher education. There are many services that could be better provided by outside entities or one institution serving as the provider for a consortium. Several major universities, including Indiana, are allowing Google to provide email and calendar services at no cost! There is still plenty of work to be done locally (like special collections), but we have to focus on working collaboratively. In an article in the EDUCAUSE Review from 2006, Charles Vest talks about the emergence of a "meta-university" that is made possible by our communication infrastructure and the open-access movement. The notion of the meta-university will not replace residential campuses, but it will "bring cost-efficiencies to institutions through the shared development of educational materials." Wheeler cited the Hathi Trust, Sakai, and Kuali as good examples of these types of meta-university collaborations.

Wheeler reported that libraries "talk a good game" about collaboration, but that we have not stepped up as we should. You cannot engage in collaboration as a dabbling option--you have to really commit to it. He listed the following as collaboration essentials:

• goal alignment (you need to date before you get married)
• values alignment (commit to having the same outcome)
• temporal alignment (if you need something NOW, your collaborators have to agree)
• talent alignment
  
• governance clarity
• problem solving alignment
• elastic community

The Project Management Group met on the second morning to discuss the notion of "innovation in libraries" from the project manager's perspective. There were lightening talks by Delphine Khanna of Penn and Jennifer Vinopal of NYU, followed by a discussion of the main obstacles to innovation and what DLF could do to help libraries be more innovative. Some of the obstacles were pretty straightforward (lack of time and resources, lack of knowledge of best practices in project development), but the obstacle that received the most discussion was "organizational culture and structure". Some of the examples of organizational culture inhibiting innovation were:

• lack of institutional support for innovation
• lock of goal alignment within the organization
• barriers to cross-departmental and cross-institutional collaboration
• organization focusing on solving yesterday's problems
• inability to prioritize
  
• hiatus between "digital library" and "traditional library services"

During the discussion of what DLF could do to help innovation, the notion of helping develop best practices for project management and software development emerged as the biggest need. Project management in libraries is usually not done with any formal program or following developed standards. DLF could support training, consultation from outside the library world, and perhaps, the development of a set of best practices that could be applied to different types of projects. We are not advocating a single project management approach, but the idea of a more formal set of options than we are currently using was appealing to many participants.

Charleston Conference, November 2009

Sue Vazakas

This was my first time at this conference, whose subtitle is "Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition." There is a day of pre-conferences followed by 2 1/2 days of regular conference.

Here's the program.

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My morning pre-conference:

Ebrarians: Meeting the Challenges of E-resources Head On had new professionals, from small- to medium-sized schools, discussing their e-resource situations.

Highlights:

• Don't buy resources you can't keep (he told of a school with money who bought lots of expensive e-things but recently had to cancel them)
  
  
• Justify expenses with statistics, statistics, statistics
  
  
• All of the speakers' libraries have gone PPV (pay-per-view)
  
  
• Make sure all licenses specify "no changes without telling us in plenty of time!" (horror stories)
  
  
• Many places systematically reexamine licenses with each renewal
  
  
• Reading books on mobile devices is going to bypass external readers like Kindle and Sony
  
  
• COMMUNICATE with the IT department! Crucial!
  
  
• What we do, we have to do really well; e.g., buy fewer resources and handle them better
  
  
• We don't all have to own a print copy, but we need to have enough staff to keep tabs on who in the consortium DOES have the last print copy, as well as maintenance, etc.
  
  
• To get training for this kind of job: classes inadequate and books wrong; what's best are apprenticeships and actually working in Cataloging, IT, or Special Collections (to learn what to save)
  

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My afternoon pre-conference:

Changing Face of Library Workflow Management: Open Source, Grid Computing, and Cloud Services

This one was fascinating. BTW, "cloud computing" is now at the top of Gartner's "hype cycle."

The 1st speaker (OCLC) said that we all agree that all the many pieces such as cataloging/acquisitions/licenses/ERM/metadata etc. should be in a single system, and that it would be great to be able to push it to a cloud. But if we agree on these things, why are libraries and library departments still fighting for control?

The next generation of library management services is going to be circ/acquisition/license management/workflow/etc. as cooperative intelligence -- not individually hard-coded systems, but a single networked presence.

The 2nd speaker discussed GALILEO in Georgia , an example of a network for the entire state.
Also, Georgia library consortia are served with an open source ILS called EVERGREEN (Georgia's own system is named PINES). In 1999, the libraries thrashed out a single policy (e.g., same fines, loan periods, etc.), and now anyone can get a library card at any library in the state and return books to any library in the state.

The bottom line of this session was: libraries need to control their own destinies.

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THURSDAY started off with a B A N G ! If you've never heard David Lankes speak, you've missed out. Here is his keynote speech (streaming video). Treat yourself and listen to it!

In a nutshell: let's get off our butts, decide what our ideal future is, decide how to get there, and break that down into steps so we can get from today to there.

We have to know WHY we're doing what we do and not just keep doing the same thing. Let's not become the music business who wanted to keep control instead of taking musicians and music fans to paradise and allowing them to get anything they wanted from anywhere. The analogy for us is: do we want to acquire more stuff? Or do we want to provide access?

More inspirational talking, followed by: "We're not in jobs; we're on a mission to improve the world!!"

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The Pricing Digital Journals session started with librarian David Stern trying once again to explain to vendors that "great deals don't matter anymore if libraries have to reduce costs."

• The vendors must understand that we are examining cost per use very closely, and having immediate access to tons of things doesn't matter when we don't have the flexibility to tailor the title lists.
  
  
• When a journal package has a high % of use, it would be more expensive to break it and do ILL instead. But when a package has a low % of use, it might be cheaper to break it to use ILL instead. But when we break it, the price cap goes away. So offer a few of the different ways to get "hybrid" models; e.g., different subject packages (e.g., philosophy, math) can have different access tiers.

The next speaker was Wiley's Christopher McKenzie (grrrrrr...), followed by an IoP guy. Wiley said that they know that libraries don't want to keep seeing new journals or fancier platforms. He reminded us several times that Wiley is the biggest publisher of society info in the world, and that journals are often the societies' biggest revenue source and Wiley must keep that in mind (rolling of eyes). They plan to create customized subject-based collections; e.g., maybe a client wants only the sci/tech pieces of the regular sci/tech/med collection.

The IoP guy made an announcement: as of 2010, they will finally offer e-only pricing! And this comment of his was interesting: they don't offer tiered pricing based on usage, because they're afraid that the libraries in China will limit usage in order to lower their prices.

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I Hear The Train a-Comin' -- Greg Tananbaum writes a column for Against the Grain. His theme was that libraries should not compete with university presses but instead work together. During this past summer, lib-license had a thread about going from an approval model to a demand model, which would be a disaster for presses.

Instead, we should link to little-used books and open them up, and not just to PDF's. Let's link them to other things, too, and across disciplines. Presses must be a bigger online presence.

Physical infrastructure is no longer the libraries' area of value. E-books go direct to patrons. The U.S. government now has 97% of their publications online. Let's not become Blockbuster, who croaked to NetFlix, who is now croaking to the home DVR. Physical aspects have been eliminated.

So digital books is the Next Big Train. Books aren't like specialized journal articles just for academies; books are for everyone! When books go completely digital, everything will be different.

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I was sick and missed the whole day on Friday :(

Here are the highlights from my Saturday morning session on Digital Historical Newspapers.

• Digital projects at libraries tend to be heavily image-based, which means QUALITY, not speed. Google Books is all about SPEED and their huge mass scanning often yields poor quality (like you can see fingers). Also, you get millions of hits for a book but you can only see some pages and not the whole book.
  
  
• The Bentley Historical Library at U. Michigan digitized their old vertical files, and now have an amazing online collection of local and other information not available anywhere else
  
  
• The way to have a successful collection of digital newspapers is: find an unmet information need, build consensus about it (e.g., they asked their history department what would be useful), identify important resources that match the need, and digitize them. Example: Birmingham Public Library's "Birmingham Iron Age" collection.
  
  
• The U. Florida speaker said RefWorks was the way they did theirs, although they had explored open-source methods (e.g., Zotero) because their Caribbean partners didn't have much of a budget. The project cost $4,000 -- one grad student brought in 600 titles, for 10 hours./week for 24 weeks. Here's their site.

The Right to Information Access

"The Right to Information Access" was the theme for the first Jeremiah Kaplan Institute on Libraries, The Information Society, and Social Policy presented by the Penn State University Libraries and the Rock Ethics Institute. Each of the four main speakers addressed the question "Although we are guaranteed the right to free epression, how can we ensure the right to access?". The speakers were John Willinsky, professor of education at Stanford and the founder of the Public Knowledge Project; Maybeth Peters, US Registrar of Copyright; John Palfrey, professor of law at Harvard University and co-author of the book "Born Digital"; and Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition of Networked Information.

In the keynote address, John Willinsky talked about the importance of institutional repositories and how we have to do a better job getting faculty to deposit their research there. Researchers worldwide should be able to have access to all of the university's research, whether their institutions subscribe to expensive journals or not. He largely blamed the faculty for not taking the time to deposit their articles, but he also urged libraries to make things as easy as possible. He also talked about his work in building the Open Journal System to make it easier for faculty and nonprofit groups to publish their own journals.

Ms. Peters talked a bit about copyright law in the US, but most of her talk focused on the Google Books settlement. While she thinks that there are several positive outcomes from the proposed settlement, she is concerned that the settlement is actually trying to make an end-run around copyright law. The orphan works component of the settlement is something that Congress should be legislating rather than having it become de facto law because of a class action lawsuit settlement. She is also concerned about the anti-trust implications surrounding Google. Under the settlement Google would have broad powers to make orphaned works available without going through a rigorous search for copyright owners. They would also face no liability if a copyright owner stepped up later--Google would only be required to take down the material. There is a hearing scheduled for mid November on the settlement.

Professor Palfrey reported on some of the findings about "Digital Natives" from his book "Born Digital". Digital Natives are individuals born after 1980 that have access to more than one digital device (computer, phone, iPod, etc.) and are sophisticated users of such devices. Most of the Digital Natives have very different views about copyright and the use of copyrighted materials. Most understand that pirating music and other digital materials is illegal, but they continue to do so anyway. Reasons range from "everybody is doing it" to "I want to stick it to the man". Palfrey is interested in how we can encourage the good things that Digital Natives can do such as bringing new creativity into research while discouraging the bad things such as multitasking during lectures and pirating music.

Clifford Lynch talked about our struggle to reconcile the right to information versus the right to entertainment. That is, the notion of the right to information is a pretty easy sale, but we are more timid about the right to entertainment (novels, music, movies). However, what is viewed as "just entertainment" by some is seen as a subject of scholarly study to others. The lines are not nearly so black and white as some think. He also talked about the right to information access going beyond just making the digital files available. True freedom of access would include the skills and availability to act on the data by modeling it, transforming it, etc.

NISO Forum: Library Resource Management Systems

The common problem presented in this forum is dealing with data in and date out. Accessing and sharing enterprise data across systems are still difficult. The phrases frequently came up during the forum are “shared data”, “shared services”, “ leverage the network(the web)”.
Here are some highlights from the forum:

Ex Libris interviews with libraries and other stake holders globally starting in March 2008. The finds-out is:
• Meet users needs – provide a single interface for discovery and delivery of all library/institutional assets
• Do more with less by consolidating workflows, uniting traditional library functions with those of the “digital library”
• Support collaboration to increase productivity, leverage “network effect”, Support re-use of metadata
• Build future services with SOA-based interoperability, Network-based (SaaS) deployment option
• Collect and incorporate user-provided data
• Enable new type of services (To enable easy data “mash-up). Expand the reach (meet the users where they are).
(Toward Service-Oriented Librarianship, Oren Beit-Arie, Ex Libri)

HEFCE funded SCONUL Shared Services feasibility study at UK, the question is
What, if any, opportunities exist to develop a shared service response (possibly Open Source) within the current LMS landscape
Whether there is a viable business case and delivery model to support any such opportunities
Here are some highlights from the study:
• 92% interest in a shared service undertaking e-Journals licensing;
• 92% interest in a shared service undertaking e-Books licensing;
• 84% interest in a shared system for Electronic Resource Management;
• 77% interest in a shared service undertaking Electronic Resource Management.
• High level of readiness to consider Open Source software (30% with a further 45% neutral)
(Investing in a Time of Disruptive Change, Rachel Bruce, JISC)
Lorcan Dempsey has a blog post which has link and comment to the SCONUL Shared Services report (http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001987.html)

“Open source systems so far seem to replicate the old systems.” (Library Domain Model workshop delegate - 19 June, 2009, JISC)
The three new paths at this point are:
1. OLE – Ready to launch 2-year build phase,
o Apply for membership in the Kuali foundation, which already has governance model established, levaging the shared service such as Rice and Fluide.
o Developing a final proposal to Mellon foundation for funding
o Jan 2011, develop URM data model and core services; Jan 2012, core partner institution replace existing ILS
2. URM -- (Ex libris)
o Commercially licensed open platform, SaaS model with local hosting option
o Decoupling metadata services(MMS) from URM and URD2(discovery and delivery)
3. OCLC WorldCat Local cooperative library management system -- Web-scale library automation

The question left after the forum is: Will networked ILS, shared data, shared index, shared service, be the solution? How to ensure agility and flexibility?

Some other note-worthy projects:
• XC user reserarch preliminary report
• KBART: knowledge base and related tools
• VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File, available as Linked Data
• Bibtip, and Bx: recommender service
• Project MESUR: project that looks at the definition and validation of a range of Usage-based metrics of scholarly impact

All the presentations quoted are available at:
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/lrms09/agenda

At the 10/19 "Open Source, Open Sesame" PTPL meeting at Gallaudet University, Marshall Breeding stated that 98% of libraries still use proprietary, not open source, ILSs. Libraries are exploring whether open source solutions can scale and become a viable alternative to commercial systems. When considering alternatives, libraries should choose a software solution based on the mert of service it delivers, the functionality provided, and the availability of APIs in order to provide interoperability with other vendors' products and provide extended functionality.

Rather than providing users with disjointed discovery silos (e.g., catalog, eresources/link resolver, federated search, IR), libraries are looking for solutions that provide Web scale discovery/deep searching of content, necessitating consolidated pre-populated indexing such as provided by Summon, PrimoCentral, WorldCat Local, and Ebsco's Discovery Service. The discovery solution should search inside a book/journal full text, across library collections including harvested local repository collections, as well as across Google Library, Internet Archive content, and other high quality Web repositories. Bradley Daigle, University of Virginia, postulated that the true value of a library's content repository is that it's permanent, trustworthy, sustainable, and discoverable.

Next generation solutions will provide a single point of entry into all the content and services offered by the library. Our current legacy ILS systems force users and staff to shift in and out of multiple systems/modules. Also at this point, open source ILS are designed on traditional ILS module architecture.

Next generation solutions will use the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model to allow independent software pieces to be brought together, interchanged/repurposed to create new back end services. SOA and enterprise integration will support more efficient sharing of services. Recombining services into a system that meets a library's workflow needs including unified fulfillment (circulation, ILL, consortial borrowing, and request management) are a goal for our next gen systems.

An Age of Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age October 15-16, 2009

Each year the annual membership meeting of ARL closes with a Fall Forum. This year’s topic grew out of the recent report of the ARL Working Group on Special Collections. As the name suggests, the program focused on the impact of digital on collecting, preserving and providing access to rare or unique research collections. There were several recurring themes.

Cross-collection collaborations. Don Waters (Mellon Foundation) took issue with the idea that it is a library’s special collections that give it its distinction. This could lead to silos and keep collections separate. Instead the library community must work together to build the collections and services to our unique collections that our users demand and deserve. Susan Nutter (North Carolina State University) summed this up as: “Special Collections must be mainstreamed. We cannot afford to keep them separate and special.”

User-centric collaborations. Listening to what users want and building services to meet those needs was another theme. G. Wayne Clough (Smithsonian) gave many examples of how curators are rethinking how they present collections online by creating ways for the public to tell the Smithsonian what they think about the collections rather than just having sites where the curators tell people what they are seeing. Clough also cautioned the group against building websites that create a physical building online but instead use the digital environment to build virtual collections that cross institutional boundaries. Josh Greenberg (New York Public Library), Fred Heath (University of Texas) and Will Noel (Walters Art Museum) were just three of the speakers who talked about ways Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social networking tools have been used to promote and provide access to Special Collections materials.

Cynthia Requardt

NISO Forum: Library Resource Management Systems

I have participated in the NISO Forum on Library Resource Management Systems from 10/8 to 10/9. As one of the twitter said, this event "was thanksgiving dinner for the brain. I'm stuffed", me, too.

The forum started with a keynote from Oren Beit-Arie, "Toward Service-Oriented Librarianship" , and ended with Marshall Breeding's closing presentation "Where can we go from here?".

Besides of the case study of successful stories from libraries used either open source ILS or vendor provided ILS, there are some open source project progress reports from OLE (by Tim McGeary, Lehigh University) and from VuFind (by Andrew Nagy, Serials Solutions). The roundtable discussion gave audience a chance to ask questions to the panlists who are from commercial and open sources support companies.

I list three points I got from the presentations and discussions, (that is my digest so far, not complete) there are: stop doing things in silo way; think where you are and where you are going before deciding on projects; and always think library is not above but part of learning society, sometimes the best solution is outside of library domain.

1. The good example of silo way doing things is CATALOGING! Open mind and open up metadata have been called by libraries and by library consortium. With today's technology it is very easy to reproduce bibliographic utilities like WorldCat, new bibliographic utility and e-resource knowledge bases are now offered to sharing the work. Silo development is also seen by libraries under the open source development, if the project is just to reproduce what is already available without new functionalities, it is wasting library resources. Why it is wasting? Because it does not match the direction that library should be going.

2. As Oren states, library projects can be "classified" into three category: traditional, transitional, and transformational.

- The traditional project is "doing the same thing differently", we still only provide "metadata services" designed for printed materials. With e-resources usage passing the 50% bench mark of library total resources usage, the majority of workflow and staff resources are still towards traditional way doing things. This is what we need to stop doing.

- The transitional project is "doing NEW things in support of traditional functions", discovery tools mentioned as in this category. Library of Congress using Flicks for its photo collection also cited as example of the project in this category. The suggestion for projects in this category is to "focus on the unique (the institutional), and integrate the common (global information). Also stop duplicate efforts.

- The transformational is " doing entirely new and different things", the Datanet project mentioned by Oren as a example of project in this category. Library services need to be considered as an integrated services to, and as part of the parent organization solution to support e-learn and e-research.

3. The functions that library provides as a stand alone services will be very limited.

MacKenzie Smith in her talk of "Integrating Library Resource Management Systems into Campus Infrastructure for Research and Education" showed the data and IT resources used by the university communities, library's data is very tiny in the map, and library services is heavily depended on the resources from university. Ezproxy, sfx, and e-reserves are mentioned as depended on SSO/Shibboleth support from the university IT, and the user data and research data will also be needed for library future development. It is important to look at the big picture before thinking of library data storage and network needs, and purchase for application software that might be better off by using enterprise applications support.

What I have learned from the meetings have direct impact on my projects such as shibboleth/remote access, course reserves system investigation, and planning for future library resources management tools...

I believe the meeting materials will help many of us to think ahead or/and rethink what we are doing now, I have included the conference link below, and the speakers' biography and most of power point presentations can be found from the link. link http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/lrms09/agenda.

Foster Zhang/Library systems