1) – The technology - OCLC have adopted and extended the Schema.org mechanisms I experimented with last year on the Cambridge LibrarySearch catalogue.  Nested within these tags are a pragmatic selection of vocabularies, so the data can be consumed on different levels for different uses cases. Search engines would just see ‘about’  and description, whilst other applications crawling the data might see library of congress name as a subject entries and DC:description fields. Nice work. They’ve also provided a human readable version of exactly what is exposed.  With the weight and expertise of OCLC behind it, the library community can engage with Google, Yahoo and others behind Schema.org and help create a better microdata format for the web. Possibly.

The Library of Congress are currently engaged in a very literal sounding Marc21 to RDF modeling exercise. I hope it can easily play nice with this pragmatic implementation.

2) The License - OCLC have released the data under an ODC-By attribution license. Nice one guys. Back in 2008 OCLC were putting up a lot of barriers to re-use of library data. It took time, but this is a great example of a large organisation listening to the needs of its constituents and changing tack.

3) The approach - OCLC consider this the beginning, not the end of their attempts and will adapt it over time based on feedback. This helps reaffirm their agenda as an organization with research at its core. It also explains why they are not releasing any full dumps of data for now. This may makes sense. Colleagues at the British Library who have released multiple versions of the British National Bibliography have commented on the problems involved in supporting older versions of a dataset.

Until then, the WorldCat robots.txt file indicates it is open for crawler business. There is a how to on the Open Bibliography blog.

OCLC Technology Evangelist Richard Wallis will be hopefully speaking about this  at the upcoming MashCat event in Cambridge.

Its refreshing then to see two articles in a mainstream tech blog like Ars Technica, (more famous for road testing the latest smartphones) focusing on the changes and challenges academic libraries are facing and going through.

The first, covers  a relatively new function for libraries, that of digital preservation. Its a great sell of the concept and the skill-set involved in making it happen. The second is  an overview of how academic libraries must meet a wider set of expectations with less resources.  In two paragraphs , the  intro sums up the problems we face at a high level better than I ever could:

Libraries are changing, despite their facades. And they’re changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren’t de-funded out of existence.

For ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, the library is changing too fast. For kids, it’s changing too slow. University students are caught in the middle. Their library experience must be like surfing: riding the edge of a moving wave, never quite cresting, never quite crashing. Such a state has to be thrilling but ultimately exhausting…

Its the kind of article your boss should be reading and fitting in his/her next presentation to the institutional board of directors.  This is genuine echo-chamber breaking stuff and long overdue. If anything, it reinforces to me how complex the problems libraries face are, and how communicating this is itself a challenge. It maybe that librarians are not really the right people to be communicating this change and we should be employing communications professionals to do this for us.

Publications

Investigating Faster Techniques for Digitization and Print-on-Demand

I’ve had my first ever article published  in the New Review of Academic Librarianship  (Vol. 18, Iss. 1, 2012). Its a targeted write up of some of the findings from my 2010 Arcadia Fellowship. Despite some doubts about the true value of LIS research journals, I’m really pleased to get this done. Its also made me realise the value editors can bring to the publication process.

I’ll eventually get the pre-print into a repository and you can view the original report upon which it was based on the Arcadia website.

Software Selection Methodology for Libraries

I’ve contributed to a software selection methodology of libraries, put together by the forward thinking folk at Cottage Labs for Lyrasis for their Open Source Software in libraries site. Its pretty general but contains a few nuggets learned from several implementation and selection projects.

Talks

I’ll be speaking speaking at DCMI seminar on Linked Data held at the British Library next week. Looks to be a great event. It will be a report back on the COMET project, hopefully timely given OCLC’s recent vote on ODC-By Licensing for WorldCat data. There have been some reservations regarding this, especially around attribution stacking. This was the the main problem we faced in Comet but attribution can work if handed correctly (i.e. better than we’ve done  so far with Marc21). Its’ a niche used license compared to CC0 or PDDL but is a really welcome move forward from OCLC. Apparently their WorldCat API sees 15 million hits a month! Thats usage that many open data suppliers could only dream of.

Code

Speaking of Comet, the code base for the whole project is now on the glorious Github, which I am slowly waking up to. I’ve also added source for a barebones interface to consumer the SALT library recommender API. I’ll make a conscious effort to get over coder shyness and get more work up on there where feasible.

My favourite discovery game from childhood. Far easier to play than starting your own webscale service...

I’ve spent a large portion of the past couple of years working with a local discovery layer (Aquabrowser) and am currently investigating equivalent ‘webscale’ discovery index solutions such as Summon, Primo Central or EBSCO Discovery that may supplement or replace it.

I’ve occasionally found myself explaining the two solutions to  non-library techy or developer colleagues. When we discuss the large webscale indexes such as Summon,  folk have on more than one occasion asked me – why not do this yourself, its just Lucene and Solr (or ElatsicSearch/Sphinx) scaled up … right?

Not exactly. Here are three reasons why …

1) Data

For this to happen, we would firstly need to get our hands on the data / full text indexed by the commercial solutions. This is no easy task.

Web scale suppliers have signed up publishers to partnership programmes to allow for harvesting and crawling of content. Agreements are most likely bi-laterial rather than universal and no real standard yet exists for this interchange.  Its easier and probably cheaper (at least initially) for me to buy into someone elses’ hard work here. But this is itself rather dangerous, it amounts to quite a serious outsource and potential loss of control. The only real influence on change could be by switching vendor.

The Library Loon has recently commented on two important recent Open Data releases from Nature and OCLC and the potential impact this can have on Discovery services.  If Open data in libraries really needs a better use case, this is surely it.

The problem is, the data that is most valuable is the stuff libraries themsleves do not own. It would be great to see more publishers follow Natures example and an end to the silly games of withholding data from competitor services.

2)  Infrastructure

Take your ‘just Lucene / Solr’, ingest and normalize varied data from 2-300+ different sources, scale for hundreds of thousands of consecutive users and accommodate well over fifty million records. Then keep it mirrored worldwide with 24×7 uptime.

Again, for a single library, the cost of an annual sub versus the startup costs for a DIY service are simply not comparable.

So why not seek a partner, I may be asked? This brings me onto …

3) Management and ownership

Collaboration is hard, especially at an institutional level (2+2 =3 etc.). I recently read this long but fascinating insight into the running of various web Portal services such as Intute, and how with a bit of dynamic thinking they  ‘could’ have morphed into a service such as Summon. Its a very personal piece, although I do agree with the inherent sillyness around trying to catalogue even ‘the best of the web’, its not simply relevant to search-engine centric web usage.

From what is described there, the budgets and resources were in place to potentially attempt this. But this was six years ago, pre-crash when we had money. Things in the UK HE sector are very different now.

With a change in operation of the JISC, its not exactly clear who could take this on, although it is possible that if  some future combination of Archives Hub and COPAC started to absorb open data from publishers, it may evolve on its own.

Does it matter?

Right now we have three large commercial players in the library web-scale market, all in close competition. Hopefully, this should surely be enough to keep things fresh and current.

I have argued that the lack of development over the past 20 years in LMS products, especially with the OPAC has assisted in the marginalization of library services. So that this is not repeated, I would again agree with the Library Loon and hope web scale discovery service vendors continue to grow and innovate with their products and rely less on the coverage of material to act as a selling point. Summon has recently launched discipline centric searches and Primo Central has some fascinating ideas around relevancy ranking understanding user context. I hope this trend at least continues.

Linked Open Data from europeana on Vimeo.

Via Open Bibliography.

The morning was given to optional plenaries, which meant I missed a lot other exciting talks as I was busy giving a brief overview of the COMET project some of its follow-on work:

Much of the afternoon was given over to Birminghams’ Public library development, namely the amazing looking new building and central service being constructed. Everything about this service will be new, from the catalogue records to the windows. Public libraries are outside my realm of alleged expertise, so this was really exciting. Of particular note was the announcement that the library will be seeking commercial sponsorship and partners to run services.

In cultural heritage, especially galleries, big commercial names such as Tate and Sainsburys have historically and recently been associated with large buildings and collections, so why not public libraries?

I had a brief twitter exchange with library advocate and human dynamo Lauren Smith. Lauren is clearly opposed to such a development and rightly concerned about the influence corporate sponsorship may have on public services, given the vital democratic importance of libraries. Does this make them more ‘sacred’ than galleries and museums as services to be ‘protected’ from corporate investment?

The argument also affects academia. My employers went through such a media wringer a few years ago when the media realized that Cambridge University Library itself would not be adverse to such a sponsorship, if the right match could be found. To my eyes, that whole non-event was largely down to a couple of bored academics stoking the media furnace. After all, Thomas Bodley was a merchant who popularised the ‘book of benefactors’ …

Back in library techy news:

• Much of the conference focus was on WorldCat, which continues to grow into a truly international service with 60+% of records now non-english!

• OCLC are proceeding apace with WorldShare, a cloud based service platform which increasingly marks them as a top tier commercial competitor to Ex Libris and Serials Solutions

• Apparently OCLC are considering licensing WorldCat under an ODC-By license, the license we applied to the OCLC records released under COMET. They are pursuing a set of community norms that seem non-commerical in aspect, which is not a good fit for data sharing. Like many others in contributing libraries, I would like to see greater sharing of Worldcat data, although I realise the arguments against are complex and legally technical. Economically, at least it must surely be viable for them. After all, if OCLC is releasing and developing top level cloud based services such as Worldcat Local and Worldshare, it can arguably afford to seek new revenue streams rather than just (re)selling data…

The debate has gone mainstream with the Economist and Wired both covering it in detail. As LIS professionals, you really have no excuse not to be tracking this. (Here is a great background read on ‘the big deal‘ package and a wonderful summary of everything the Elsevier Boycott stands for from ‘Fake Elsevier’.).

One recent post from the ‘Library Loon’, ‘what you can and can’t ask Librarians‘ struck a real personal chord. It nicely explains the conundrum librarians face with the Big Deal journal package:

Elsevier sells multi-journal packages, and like coffee drinks at Starbuck’s, they come in large, immense, and ginormous sizes, all overpriced. Nor are they mix-and-match; libraries can’t substitute journals they want for journals they don’t. It’s pure take-it-or-leave-it.

(Economists consider this a sneaky way of force-selling crappy journals that would never make it in a sole-subscription world. The Loon believes the economists quite right.)

So when you tell a librarian “stop subscribing to Elsevier journals!” you are thinking a dozen or so journals in your field, while the librarian has no choice but to think about several hundred journals running the entire gamut of disciplines. There’s a word for what would happen to that librarian if he acceded to your request, without the full knowledge and consent of the rest of the institution. That word is “fired.” If the librarian is only a little unlucky, that word is instead “lynched.”

I rather have to agree with this even if it seems a bit simple. We have been buying this stuff mostly because academics wanted it! The author also mentions professional ethics in the piece.

That issue aside, librarians have been trained not to consider the ethics of information production in their journal purchases. Library schools discuss instead gauges of usage, disciplinary accreditation, search-site usability, accessibility (sometimes; not often enough, in the Loon’s opinion), and the same hollow bibliometric measures that faculty wrongly rely upon. Who else trained librarians to act this way? Faculty, of course, considering librarians little more than walking wallets. See “fired” and “lynched” above.

Its the reference to ethics here that gave me pause. After all, the ALA has an ethical code. In the UK, we have a professional Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics managed by CILIP, (n.b. I’m no longer a member of CILIP, resigning my chartership some time ago due to various reasons).

I first covered professional ethics during my Masters and again during Chartership. In both cases, we had to refer to vaguely theoretical exercises such as stocking copies of ‘Mein Kampf’ or supplying books on how to commit suicide to people who are having a bad day. The more I think about it, the more ‘Big Deal’ purchasing and other online licensing deals could be considered as excellent use cases for studying and applying such ethical principles. I wonder if LIS courses are doing so?

Looking explicitly at the UK CILIP guidelines, I’m then wondering where ‘big package’ purchasing and the growing related conception of the ‘science poor’ stuck behind a pay wall stack up against our principles. To consider a few:

2. Concern for the good reputation of the information profession.

I would argue that buying big packages has hurt our image in the longer term, even though its done at the behest of others. Signing large long term license deals with no real get-out to publishers with 36% profit margins has not helped our professional image.

3. Commitment to the defence, and the advancement, of access to information, ideas and works of the imagination.

This is tricky. Publishers making stuff available online in the firstplace is arguably a massive advancement of access to information. Placing it behind a £30 an article pay-wall whilst we remove the print copies from the shelves is not. At least some libraries negotiate walk-in access for eresource subscriptions.

4. Provision of the best possible service within available resources.

I would argue that we could do more here to push our readers changing needs to publishers, especially around turn-around of publication and computational access to full-text and datasets for mining. These issues are technical and complex, but LIS professionals need to get a handle on them if we are to remain relevant to our readers. Simply not understanding is not good enough.

5. Concern for balancing the needs of actual and potential users and the reasonable demands of employers.

This principle would certainly need to be considered when signing up for a big package. It refers to a balance rather than ruling in favour of one group, something that is hard to achieve.

7. Impartiality, and avoidance of inappropriate bias, in acquiring and evaluating information and in mediating it to other information users.

As the Library Loon stated, we are trained to assess quality and validity of material, not the ethics behind its production and sale. Is this something we should be doing, are we really doing it via Open Access? How can we do so and remain impartial?

9. Concern for the conservation and preservation of our information heritage in all formats.

Currently, online publishing models make it hard for librarians to preserve digital material. We are using and funding services such as LOCKS and Portico to do so. In the long term, we cannot rely on the publishers to do this for us.

10. Respect for, and understanding of, the integrity of information items and for the intellectual effort of those who created them.

With peer review literature, this is difficult as rights are often signed away. Open Access awareness raising is still a vital. We should respect the role publisher play in publication, but should also recognize that the author comes first. Educating academic publishers about open access options is one way to go, although its also really hard.

But in doing this, I also begun to wonder about the longer term relevance of the journal / article model, especially for professional communication. It seems somewhat slow and unwieldy, and whilst peer review was usefully editorially, was it truly necessary in what is often at best a quasi-academic discipline?

In full-on academia, there are noted shifts away from traditional publishing. PLOS has built a powerful brand around an established traditional open access journal and a variety of experimental publishing platforms. The Physics community has made strong investment in ArXiv and economists have long favoured locally published working papers to quickly disseminate research. I suspect diversification of practice across disciplines is only going to continue.

In the U.S, its my understanding that publishing in LIS journals is necessary for career advancement. It is not the case in the UK, although I’m sure my C.V. could do with a few more. Critically, LIS journals subs cost money and articles in them may never reach potential readers, especially those early on in their career. With professional development budgets shrinking along with the profession itself, is this really the best model to share much needed research and examples of best practice?

Librarians are fantastic at building social networks and sharing findings, both in brief and in-depth. Slowing that process down to the pace of journal publishing (often over six months) can negate the impact. In theory, its simple for me to write up and publish any research myself. My Mac has a ‘print to PDF’ option. This blog can host it and Google can index it. Or I could do it properly and publish in semantic HTML. All I need it time and enough folk on Twitter to publicize it. So what exactly is being gained through an LIS journal? The journal could of course reject me, but my blog has live analytic s of usage and a comments section where my peers can voice their opinions, in person or anonymously.

This is a highly personal opinion, one largely formed out of supposition rather than any noted study of usage. I’ve nothing against those in publishing either, they play a vital role in gluing the profession together. I’m more concerned about the impact of the current model.

I’d be interested in hearing how folk think getting published in an LIS or related journal can add value over a blog or simply publishing a working paper or report online.

After swearing off any JISC funded projects into Open Data publishing, I’ve somehow found myself involved in four this year. Safe to say my new years resolutions include learning how to say no in a better fashion.

The first to kick off in earnest is Open Bibliography 2 headed by the Open Bibliographic Data Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation, with Cambridge University Library as a partner.

If you’ve not chanced upon it, Open Bibliography is fascinating concept encompassing software, data and working practices around a belief in a core, pragmatic description of a work that cannot be realistically copyrighted. This is enshrined in a set of Open Bibliography principles.

The key software output will be BibServer, an Open Source tool to quickly and easily publish personal and group bibliographies of one to many thousand records in size. Its got a working version already available to the public in the form of BibSoup (be it one in rapid development). Peter Murrary-Rust has already blogged an excellent introduction to the software and underlying concepts.

The project will also see the release of more open bibliographic data with a focus in the STM sector. Along with full text, libraries spend a lot of money on ‘pure data’ services, from simple subject indexes to large web scale discovery solutions. Opening up the underlying datasets and providing new open source alternatives to services around it could improve competition in the marketplace by driving up levels of innovation amongst vendors.

As well as contributing to a really interesting development, one of the key benefits for myself and hopefully my employers will be in working closely with researchers at a number of levels to better gage their requirements for discovery, publishing and management of bibliographic resources.