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.

Twitter blew up a bit the other night with the revelation at a London event that UCL library spends over one million pounds sterling a year on titles from one single publisher alone, namely Elsevier. (Update: Video of the debate here. According to @markgfh UCL apparently confirmed the spend, first revealed by @david_colquhoun).

For some in library-land, the only revelation was that this is a revelation. The truth is that big packages like Elseviers’ Science Direct cost big money.

"To read your own papers you must pay ..."

A glance at the UCL Metalib portal reveals 144 listed ejournal publishers, so their total annual ejournal spend must be a lot higher. According to Wikipedia, UCL has a lot of academics, so its probably a high user:

“UCL has over 4,000 academic and research staff and 648 professors, the highest number of any British university.”

So sticking with Elsever, lets do some super basic maths:

1,000,000 / 4,000 = £250 per academic user per year!

Compared to the spend on academics themselves (average wage £43,486 a year in 2007-08, £69,870 for professors! source -THES)  this is possibly a marginal cost for the taxpayer and a necessary one. After all, universities need academics and academics need to read / get published in journals to advance their career and share knowledge … so honestly, why all the fuss?

Well, one million is still a big number (once upon a time, you could hold the world to ransom for a million dollars …), and given Elseviers’ focus on the sciences, the actual usage figure will be skewed somewhat to a proportion of the faculty. So this will grab attention, at least in the humanities.

The real problem to my eyes lies with the actual unit cost supposedly behind this, the ‘pay per view’, which makes accurate comparative modeling of the true cost of big package access really difficult.

Elsevier currently charge $31.50 (subject to change) per access for their own content, around £20. Assuming each UCL academic gets to view over 23 articles on Elsevier platforms a year, they allegedly get value for money from the big package. Many will probably soak this up looking at their own work and checking citations alone. For some downloading hundreds a month, its a total bargin. This is how Elsevier and other justify the cost of the big package.

So all is well and against this £20 a hit cost the big package is really good value for money as libraries can clear the shelves of dusty journals (I wish).

Or is it? Ask anyone who runs a website or online service in the non-academic world if they think that this is an accurate and fair cost. £20 per PDF download? A high price for a crummy format. Publishers comment on re-inventing interfaces and platforms to cope with demand. I still can’t see any remote justification for the cost in any of these for the online products offered. If Amazon had adopted this pricing model and technology for the Kindle, it would have been laughed out of town.

What relationship does this £20 per download unit cost bear to the actual operational cost? Very little I suspect, its smoke and mirrors. Many academics, who view articles using library subscription access will be unaware of it, but its there.

So I think Elsevier are overcharging and I think there is serious and unfair profit being made out of academic works. We are being held to ransom, with the academic career structure forcing academics into publishing to get recognition and librarians into buying.

Need more evidence? Check out the big package annual price hikes. Research Libraries UK  has had to fight year-on-year price increases of over 5% (well in advance of inflation) by going head to head with Elsevier. Academic support has been muted, but librarians are getting their hands dirty in some serious negotiation on their behalf.

For a better indication of the attitude, check out the Reed Elsevier financial reports on the web aimed at investors. You get a real idea of who their true target customer is.

Publishers will also use the cost of peer review to cover their tracks. With the move to online publishing, many academics now perform their own basic editorial work, including typsetting, formatting, proofing and more. And the vaunted peer-review system that underpins it it? All done by volunteers, increasingly swamped by the growth in review requests as the big package model produces more journals to bulk out the ‘value’. Surely the £500 submission fee can cover this?

It sounds terrible, but universities can seemingly afford to pay, at least in the UK. The true cost of closed access academic publishing is probably even harder to quantify when we consider the wider implications on those without access to a major University library online service. They have been dubbed the ‘scholarly poor’, those on the wrong side of the pay-wall who cannot access literature vital for personal and social development. Peter Murray-Rust and many others are increasingly vocal about this issue.

Today, there has been further movement against this big business profit racket and surprisingly, its from a Tory-led government:

The government has signaled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals.

The policy is in the government document Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth published on Monday, which also includes plans for a series of cash prizes for teams to solve specific scientific challenges and a new £75m fund for small businesses to develop their ideas into commercial products.

The commitment to making publicly funded research free to access is a direct challenge to the business models of the big academic publishing companies, which are the gatekeepers for the majority of high-quality scientific research. Previous attempts by open access publishers to break this stranglehold over the dissemination of scientific results have largely failed.

[Guardian]

Is this good news? Depends on the actual definition of Open Access, and what ‘free’ usage actually entails. There will still be a cost to academia, as most open access publishing requires a hefty fee up front.

Still, its a welcome start. If this stimulates the academic publishing market away from its leeching, then all the better.

Lets see some real innovation from publishers in response to this to justify the high cost of their service. Dropping PDF’s and allowing subscribers to have unrestricted text mining would be a start.

Offering a range of financial options beyond rip off pay per view and the murky ‘big deal’ is a must.

After about 10 years supporting IT in libraries, I feel the festive need to spread some goodwill and have tried to scrawl down a few tips to help Librarians and their systems support folk better work together.

I’ve tried not to patronise, all of the below is based on personal experience in several roles. I know we as help providers can often do better, but equally, things can go much more smoothly if we get useful information upfront and some effort to manage expectation is made.

The helpdesk of my dreams from the wonderful XKCD

I’ve also another angle. In the strange world of library systems and IT services, we make use of a lot of third party services and products. This often puts library systems people in the unenviable position of feeding one set of helpdesk requests directly into another, and sitting in the middle. So we know heldpesk frustration. As such, this is based on my experiences both as a user and provider of helpdesk services.

1) Be precise and be concise!

I’ve seen plenty of queries written up as two long conversational paragraphs with little factual data about the actual problem. This is often fun to read, but really wastes time at both ends. The first stage we attempt in diagnosis is often reproduction of a problem and we need hard facts and examples to do this. You will get a better, quicker response if you help us to reproduce problems, specifically:

a) Provide context. Describe what you would expect to see or occur, and what you get instead. Often, it may be the first time your IT support is looking at the software or use case you are presenting, so this can be invaluable

b) Provide clear examples. If web page URL’s or specific records or identifiers are involved, please list them.

c) If there are specific criteria or patterns associated with a problem, list these (i.e. it only affects undergraduates)

c) Provide details of your environment. If you are using a web browser, say which one and version. If you are outside of a University network, say so!

e) We may need to check log files, so time / date of trying something that failed is often helpful

2) “Could you just try turning it off and on again” …

It may be a cliche, but it works. So do please try turning things on and off first and reproducing a problem yourself. This includes restarting software apps, reloading browsers and rebooting PCs before trying again. You may get it to work, or equally, if you try this and still see a problem, you will hopefully reinforce in the mind of a helpdesk worker the possibility of a real bug or config fix.

If you can, trying to reproduce on a colleagues’ machine or via another web browser is also really helpful.

If the problem goes away, it should not prevent you from reporting it, but may give you a workaround and better help us diagnose the cause.

3) Use official mechanisms

Generic help-desk emails and phone lines may seem soul-less and full of jargon filled messages about response times, but we use them for a reason. Namely, we can cover in case of leave (holiday!), or give time to staff wanting to do other stuff, like improve or change things as well as fixing them. So please use them rather than direct emails or calls.

Equally, if you see us eating lunch or having coffee, don’t assume thats an open helpdesk opportunity. We need a break too. (And we really usually cannot fix your home PC just for fun, would you honestly ask a plumber for free advice?)

Lastly, if you get really frustrated or have a genuine emergency, do go knocking, but only if its ok to do so. If you are lucky enough to have IT support with an open door policy, then congratulations. I know of Sys Admins who live behind locked doors and intercom systems …

4) Understand what you are dealing with and learn about it

As I said in the introduction, many of the IT support folk you interact with are often having to play as middle-men. Even when working with open source or in-house systems, they will not necessarily have access to source code or the time to develop a fix straight away. Understand that a true solution may take time to provide. In many cases, you will just get a work-around. This is largely a by-product of economies of scale and a fact of modern life, no matter how frustrating it may be.

In many cases, F.A.Q.s and documentation will be made available directly to you. To a certain point, reading and taking these in is part of personal professional development, so at least give them a try in the first instance.

Libraries are now heavily focused around IT, they are not places for the computer-phobic to hide. Learning new things constantly is a necessary part of any IT workers’ job. To a degree, its now the same with librarians as well.

You can also try Googling a description of the problem or an error message. Without wishing to entirely remove the curtain from around the wizard, this is often a key strategy in our ‘effective problem resolution’.

5) Have perspective

Your problem may be urgent to you right now, especially if you have a deadline or angry user to deal with. However, do try and avoid ‘affirmative sentencing’ such as ‘this needs to be rectified as soon as possible‘ or ‘we need an immediate response‘ when an americanised label on a web page offends or an e-journal vendors site is down.  Unless you really are the director of an institution, this usually just amuses, or winds folk up.

To responsible IT Professionals, real serious problems like downed systems or missing data generally fall into this category anyway and we would (or should) have automatic mechanisms for picking them up and maybe even dealing with them.

With that done, I would appreciate that you may have some opinions about your expectations as helpdesk as users. I do.

So in turn, here is what I think that you (and myself) as users of help-desks really should really should expect…

1) A useful answer in good time

Helpdesk queries that ‘fall between the gaps’ suck. This happens to me. Persistence in having to chase often pays off but seems to be a root cause in raising workplace stress. As such, you should always be entitled to an answer, and if not a satisfactory response or conclusion, an understandable and non-patronizing explanation as to why your needs cannot be currently be met, preferably with some tips for a workaround.

If service level agreements are in place regarding response times, they should be met.

2) A means of escalation / further  support

Any service you use should have a clear line of escalation if you are not happy with an answer. This should be to a line manager of senior member of staff. Being polite and constructive here is the best way to get a response, rather than an outright attack on what may just be a harassed / overworked helpdesk worker on the front-lines. Explain what you need to move forward and what you felt was missing from the original exchange.

3) Your back covered

As librarians, most of your problems are often the problems of others, your readers and users. When those others are red and hot faced in front of you, they seem all encompassing, and sometimes never willing to go away. Ultimately, I think systems people should be able to provide some level of contact and backup in this situations, and even offer to deal directly with users on your behalf. This is a natural part of teamwork, after-all.

Lastly, if like me, you are also seen as a source of IT advice to extended family and friends, here is another great XKCD...

As I tweeted, by the afternoon I was simply blown away by the sheer scale of things being worked on at Oxford, specifically:

• The Bodleian Digital Asset Management System – an overview by Neil Jeffreries highlighted the vast efforts being made in Oxford. They aim to cover many different use cases – no single piece application, tool or standard in the stack deemed un-replaceable, ‘todays standards are tomorrows’ legacy’
• Oxford are committed to re-use of data. We saw some great insights into having their material covered by Europeana from Alexander Huber, Metadata Co-ordinator
• Parallel Developments in Bio-Sciences. Professor Anne Trefethen, Director, Oxford e-Research Centre covered some of the challenges of amalgamating various different experts groups metadata standards into a set of workable methods for reproducing experiments. This also highlighted the dangers of practitioners assembling standards in isolation, a message to be heeded by those looking at future library standards
• Discussions in an open session at the end around metadata standards were pleasingly pragmatic, especially in the advent of the Library of Congress’s shift from Marc21. They were focused around the understanding that one size will never fit all and only a core of metadata is common to all use cases in scholarly communication. This was referred to as ‘Basic epistemology’ - knowledge for its own sake being the best common denominator
•  I also found this concept to be usefully compatible with the philosophy behind the Open Bibliography Principles, specifically that basic factual knowledge regarding a work should be universally accepted as open. Later in the week, I also attended a great event aimed at cultural institutions hosted by the OKFN at the Wellcome Trust. I heard more about Europeana and their efforts to get a core subset of their metadata out under CC0. Again, pragmatism rules, and there are practical workarounds that be used to get workable quality usable data shared openly

At the Oxford event, I also gave a somewhat tangential look at library catalogue evolution, recent work in Cambridge and how a move towards greater sharing of data can perhaps be seen as part of the changes we in libraries are going through to better address the needs of ‘Generation Y’.

My slides:

I attempted to talk about RDF and how it may be useful to libraries, but think this section fell a bit short. Thankfully, this by Dorothea Salo arrived in my Twitter feed the next day, so if you heard me waffle on and really want to know about how it *could* be a useful standard for some use cases in the future, do take a look …

  the Library community’s data carrier, MARC, is “based on forty-year-old techniques for data management and is out of step with programming styles of today.” [1]  The Working Group called for a format that will “accommodate and distinguish expert-, automated-, and self-generated metadata, including annotations (reviews, comments, and usage data.” [2]  The Working Group agreed that MARC has served the library community well in the pre-Web environment, but something new is now needed to implement the recommendations made in the Working Group’s seminal report. In its recommendations, the Working Group called upon the Library of Congress to take action. In recommendation 3.1.1, the members wrote:

“Recognizing that Z39.2/MARC are no longer fit for the purpose, work with the library and other interested communities to specify and implement a carrier for bibliographic information that is capable of representing the full range of data of interest to libraries, and of facilitating the exchange of such data both within the library community and with related communities.” [3]

…..

With these strong statements from two expert groups, the Library of Congress is committed to developing, in collaboration with librarians, standards experts, and technologists a new bibliographic framework that will serve the associated communities well into the future. Within the Library, staff from the Network Development and Standards Office (within the Technology Policy directorate) and the Policy and Standards Division (within the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access directorate) have been meeting with Beacher Wiggins (Director, ABA), Ruth Scovill (Director, Technology Policy), and me to craft a plan for proceeding with the development of a bibliographic framework for the future.

Enjoy the whole thing here.

Such news honestly fills me with joy,  but I may need to reword some forthcoming talks. Lots of people have been tweeting and blogging, but Roy Tennant at Library Journal is surely allowed to celebrate the most, after all, he called for this nearly ten years ago.

The Last Supper for Marc21, hopefully with no resurrection in sight ...

Marc21 is more than a container format. Along with AACR2 (and RDA really) its a whole set of syntaxes, standards and working practices that represent a ‘transcriptive approach’ to metadata creation designed to generate a card catalogue record. This attitude has never worked to satisfaction in the networked environment and has given modern library programmers and hackers hours of pain.

Some thoughts about what may come to replace it …

Is Linked Data / RDF the right choice?

The LOC statement indicates a preference for Linked Data / RDF, but does not draw a distinction between the two. One is an idea, one is a syntax that can be used to encapsulate that idea. Still, RDF remains the most popular way of producing linked datasets.

Have Library of Congress made the right choice? Far to early to say. Its down to them to evaluate the tech, which is why they will be consulting. Some people will say that the LOC is a bit behind, and that linked data is a ‘has-been’ technology, a dead-duck. They may suggest some popular current tech alternatives such as:

• Schema.org. / HTML5  Microdata formats. Right now, this is not really the same use case as Marc, although a Marc replacement should be able to easily translate into this sphere. In some respects, for cultural heritage and research, what Google is doing is almost immaterial, as the web exists and extends well beyond search and advertising  (and IMHO DuckDuckGo is generally a better search engine for many research purposes). Microdata right now is aimed at commercial applications and getting better sales links out there. A richer academic / cultural heritage application would be useful, but would need to be well adopted.

• NoSQL databases are great for varied types of data and are a natural fit for bib data, but they are just database software, just as plain and simple JSON is a great container format and only that (ditto with plain and simple XML). Anyone using such tech as an excuse for unstructured data will find structure inevitably creeps in. One day, they may want to look for a schema or standard to help simplify things…

We in cultural heritage really need some level of schema and data structure to work with from the get-go, a base set of fields that have a well defined meaning and that are commonly understood by people on opposite sides of the globe doing the same job. We need some defined controlled way of filling these fields with text. In terms of subject and name authority control on a global scale, linked data has such obvious advantages that it needs serious consideration.

Then we can wrap them up in sexy JSON and load them into our funky mongodbs. Technology should not dominate the conversation here, but it should be seen in perspective. We have a lot more flexibility, choice and freedom than we did 40 years ago when Marc21 was created.

How does this tie into the major library system vendors?

Details on next-gen LMS systems are thin on the ground. Serials Solutions are apparently building a web scale management around linked data. Carl Grant has indicated that Ex Libris Alma has hooks for linked data, presumably URIs for record nodes, which seems a prudent choice. He argues that RDF linked data still needs to find its killer app. Maybe library management is it? Imagine records that catalogue themselves by following links in data to generate new access points …

OCLC have ideas in this direction and have been experimenting with linked data. Nothing much yet other than data, though.

This announcement may be timely for some development cycles, less so for others. I would suggest that LMS vendor takeup of any new standard in at least an import/export/creation capacity will be vital to product success as long as librarians still care about data standards. I could be wrong though.

UK experience with RDF / Linked data

The UK has a slight edge over the US, thanks in part to the initial work of the discovery programme. The British Library BNB is available as linked RDF and would arguably act as an ideal test platform for examining many of the issues that might arise during standards formulation. The Open Bibliography project has lead the way in exploring open licensing.

That the UK community has largely recognized the need for permissive licensing (CC0 / PDDL) around linked data is prehaps the main thing to shout about at this stage. When navigating links, coming up against a license wall stopping re-use could make life really difficult.

Do we need complexity?

One of the myths we really need to blow open is that libraries need and use rich and complex metadata even for everyday needs. We really don’t.

We need a baseline standard that is easy to understand for staff and readers, easy to implement and to get right. This will be easily sharable and useable outside of ‘libraryland’.

The evidence? According to OCLC Research only 10% of all Marc tags in Worldcat appear in 100% of all Worldcat records. 65% of tags appear in less that 1% of records. Basically, most of it is un-used. The standard is bloated. Think about all those meaningless icons in MS Word …

Extensible standards such as Dublin Core and flexible RDF vocabularies would allow for complexity to be included when needed and ignored when not, in a way Marc does not. To paraphrase Owen Stephens at a recent JISC event, an attempt to rebuild the Marc tagset in RDF whilst ignoring existing vocabularies would be an abject failure, along the lines of MarcXML (‘the worst of both worlds’).

How can we involve others?

Making the standard or approach useful to a wider community beyond ‘libraryland’ will be vital to its success. The statement seems to recognize this, but is it enough to leave its ownership in the hands of librarians and the LOC alone?

Karen Coyle is again the voice of reason, arguing again and again quite practically that if the Library of Congress want a truly useful open standard accepted beyond libraries, they need to open up its formulation, management and ownership to wider body. She draws attention to NISO’s offer to take ownership of the work.

I tend to agree, and hope the LOC steps back here. NISO know standards and how to manage change. Tying into this blogs’ emerging wider theme, its also a chance for everyone, (vendors, libraries and publishers) to bang heads and innovate on the same page. Interesting times ahead.

OpenURL is a standard/ technology/ product that has been in use for over ten years in libraries. If you are not familiar with the term, its a way of getting a library reader to the online full text that their institution subscribes to, going one step beyond a DOI. When launched, it was seen as an innovative solution to a real problem, and like many good ideas was the brainchild of one individual.

How OpenURL works - University of Queensland

OpenURL links contain citation metadata and are passed to an institutions ‘Link Resolver’, which queries its ‘knowledgebase’ of library subscriptions and directs the reader to the appropriate full text for them, usually via a pop-up menu.

Here is a much better fuller explanation.  SFX and Serials Solutions 360 Link are popular Link Resolver products and provide central knowledgebases libraries can activate their holdings on.

OpenURL has never been massively sexy, but it continues to play a large role in online library services.

I would suggest it that it was a great idea in its day, but  has since been hampered by a lack of innovation in its current presentation and approach. Some parts of the concept probably need a real rethink.

This post looks at the current state of OpenURL from the point of view of major stakeholders.

1) Readers

Reader interaction with a link resolver is typically through a pop-up menu  (example). They tend to view this as  part of the ‘paywall’, as it is often accompanied by a proxy server or federated access login. They may see this as an additional unnecessary step (‘why can’t I just click on the link and get to what I need?’).

Link resolver menus suffers from confusing terminology, and have been hampered by feature creep. They were originally intended to offer print alternatives to full text, something that is less necessary these days. Librarians have also tried to add other helpful links, which tend not to be so. Cambridge is as guilty of this as anyone and our supplier, Ex-Libris has offered a better lighter menu we really should adopt.

To get to the menu, readers have to click on a OpenURL button by a citation (the Cambridge one is branded ‘ejournals@cambridge’). I would suggest that readers find the presence of a button even when there is no full text confusing (see point 4 below).  And why do we need to offer pop-ups in 2011?

If we could find a way to maintain the functionality of the SFX menu but in a more discreet fashion, it would be better for readers. Its’ an additional frustration step that in my opinion needs to go.

2) Library System vendors
OpenURL seems to remain on vendors’ radar as both a useful service and a profitable product. Ex-Libris seem to be folding the functionality into its new generation of resource management product. All seem to be investing in knowledge bases as management of subscription resources become more important.

Some are depreciating its importance to the end-user, Serials Solutions Summon is proposing index enriched URLs that know a customers supplier for a text and try not to bother them with a pop-up window, which seems sensible, assuming it works.

3) Librarians
Following on from the previous point, Librarians are now heavily reliant upon OpenURL knowledge bases for a variety of back office functions. Due to this, currency of information in a knowledgebase is mission critical to libraries and should be pursued as a matter of urgency. We’ve seen some improvements in publishers and vendors sharing information updating (KBART). This is welcome, but I’m sure every vendor could do more. I speak to Librarians who would want a 48 maximum turnaround on getting this data updated.

Why? because it costs us money (lots). For every week or month a knowledge base cannot reflect our ejournal holdings accurately, some of our expensive subscriptions  cannot be accessed via menus and A-Z’s, so we are effectively wasting our subs. When your ejournals budget is 6-7 figures long, this waste can add up quick.

If vendors or publishers were directly feeling this pinch rather than readers and librarians, I would imagine things may be different.

OpenURL linking itself is probably a necessary evil given the multitude of vendors and interfaces we have for A&I and full text. I doubt we will ever truly be able to offer ‘one search box to rule them all’ and will thus have to resort to’ glue technologies’ like OpenURL.  What  we really need is a better way to facilitate the linking, which brings me onto …

4) Database and ejournal publishers

OpenURL support has always been patchy with publishers. There are to my mind two major problems with the way OpenURL has been implemented by publishers.

1) Granularity of linking. Some will resolve incoming URL’s fine. Others not so. Some publishers will always drop the reader at a title page for the journal, rather than the actual article required. I assume they see OpenURL as an unwelcome form of deep-linking that bypasses their sites navigation. This impairs the experience for the end user, who assume they are getting a ‘straight to PDF’ button on the link resolvers’ menu.

2) Knowledge of customer holdings. One of my major problems with OpenURL has been the way its been supported in our subscription abstract/ citation databases, e.g.  Web of Knowledge, Scopus etc. They tend to ‘spam’ a button by every citation result and force the reader to have to click on each one to see if the library really does have a full text subscription.

OpenURL links in a citation database - present regardless of actual full text availability

If your workflow involves checking every week for new research papers on a subject, this can get tedious really quickly.

Only Google Scholar has bothered to improve on the button, by harvesting our holdings from our knowledge-base directly and only showing a link when we have the full text.  No other abstract/citation service has bothered to replicate this. Its not even innovation, just bothering to stay competitive.

A better solution

What bothers me is that it is technically trivial to do achieve this even without harvesting.

How? Using API’s and a bit of Ajax or even server-side code, we can easily step beyond the ‘openurl button’ and show holdings information from the link resolver directly in the citation results, along with some branding for the library that picks up the expensive tab for the full text.

All major link resolvers have API’s,  the OpenURL spec itself supports XML for requests and responses.

Why don’t publishers do this? My deeply cynical thought is that as most sell full text as well as citation search services, they would prefer to sell you their copy of the full text alongside the citation.

They might even see OpenURL links as a means for competitors to push their full text into  interfaces. Maybe by keeping things confusing with a generic OpenURL button,  they hope that readers may get frustrated and start paying $30 for an article (24 hours only!) instead …

To make matters worse, Scopus and Science Direct can now pull in article recommendations from the excellent Ex Libris bX service directly and display it ‘in-interface’. Great stuff, so why can’t they do the same with our full text holdings from the Ex Libris SFX link resolver API?

This would be best for readers, and thus for librarians. Not sure how it would affect publisher profit margins though.

So here we have an example of a market driven innovation falling behind,  a ‘gap’ between reader expectation/ current web technology and publisher business models. OpenURL sits uneasily between library, system vendor, publisher and the reader. In its current form, it will never truly satisfy anyone.

• A) We lack popular culture images to tack our innovative aspirations onto (i.e. moon rockets, Asimov’s robots)
• B) A lack of conflict and fear-of-failure have prevented us from innovating on a big scale
• C) This is compounded by information overload stopping things from being tried again, alongside a risk-adverse culture focused on short-term gains

Starship concept art by Chris Foss - innovation needs big bright imagery to drive it forward

Having done his essay a massive injustice with that summary, I’d like to now painfully attempt to frame some of his arguments in the context of libraries and higher education.

A) We lack popular culture images to tack our innovative aspirations onto
Probably true. Most of the available sci-fi images of future libraries involve no librarians or library buildings, the classic ‘Library of Congress on a single disc’ conceit is one. If anything, this is symptomatic of the view of libraries as centres of content rather than actual service providers.

To be honest, the Internet blew any fictional aspirational images we might have had out of the water. We now need better images that encompass the actual service librarians provide. To go back to Stephenson, his excellent novel Snow Crash features an intelligent software agent called The Librarian, linked constantly to the Internet, able to interpret and assist in serious research, always on call. Not a bad image. To bad its not a real person.

A typical mad scientist. Is he on your library payroll?

B) A lack of conflict and fear-of-failure have prevented us from innovating on a big scale
Partly true, which is not to say that we do not innovate at all. In his argument, Stephenson uses the cold war as his motivator for human space travel. I would argue that libraries are under so much pressure from Google, our users, our publishers and lots of other stuff that we can’t afford  NOT to innovate.

I’ve actually got innovation built into my job spec. This is both ace and daunting. Monday mornings are much better spent topping up on coffee and amusing cat photos rather than dreaming up some new amazing concept.

Me aside, librarians and libraries in Universities are often quite keen in trying new things. Here are four models for how we innovate in libraries in UK HE:

1. We innovate nationally – say the JISC, RLUK or some other funding body identifies a problem, comes up with a solution and funds it. Sometimes this works (COPAC = ace national research catalogue), sometimes it stagnates as it does not meet end-user needs  (Lots of mostly empty institutional repositories, rather than a national level subject based service).  But at least we tried
2. We outsource innovation to our software suppliers -  sometimes this works amazingly (Summon, bX), other times they ignore us and let products stagnate as they remain profitable without having to be rethought. I would argue that this was largely the only real model we had from the late 1990s till around 2005, whilst we were still trying to understand the Internet. The inability of the library systems market to develop better OPAC interfaces (until they decided to resell them as new products) has meant that we now cannot afford to rely on them  alone
3. We innovate in house, preferably on somone elses’ coin (JISC again). Similar issues to number one, but often better focused on local needs
4. We hope that someone clever does something amazing. Sometimes they do.

A combination of all four and others ought to see us through. Yet it does not always.

C) Lack of large scale innovation is  compounded by information overload stopping things from being tried again, alongside a risk-adverse culture focused on short-term gains

Stephenson has a great section on this which I will quote:

In his recent book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that contrasts with the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments tend to get pulled back toward a sort of ecological consensus by interbreeding. “Galapagan isolation” vs. the “nervous corporate hierarchy” is the contrast staked out by Harford in assessing the ability of an organization to innovate.

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

The more we stifle our ability to fail, the less flexible and adaptive we become. Through caution we are destroying our ability to evolve. In HE, where image and prestige are important, the bigger you are, the greater the risk of failure becomes as you worry about tarnished reputations.

I look at smaller ‘up-and-coming Universities’ aiming to improve research impact and student satisfaction ratings. I see that they are jumping on and off bandwagons and trying new things all the time. This is resulting in a lot of junk but also some success.  Either way, they are gaining the in-house ability to develop new things quicker and learning how to drop stuff they do not need, which are vital functions of any body operating in the fast moving information environment.

Considering I work in the birthplace of evolutionary theory, its a bit ironic.

Again, the bigger and more successful you get, the harder it becomes to innovate. Google, once a symbol of innovation has recently dropped its ‘labs’ brand.

I’ll add a final point specific to libraries and supporting services generally.

D) What else is wrong? A gap between real service and innovation

If  I were to add anything to Stephensons’ arguments as applied to libraries, its on the gap between innovation and the end user.

In a University faculty, where researchers may experiment, write up and move on after maybe setting up a spin-off company, innovation has a natural endpoint.

In a service environment such as a library,  whenever innovation occurs and appears to be successful, it needs to be translated into the mainstream, turned into a new product or service and pushed into production. Even with the concept of the perpetual beta, this is really hard. One way to innovate is to stop doing stuff, let things go. I think libraries are particularly bad at this.

So to summarize, we innovate plenty. There is not so much starvation as a gap between real services and innovation and in innovating with existing services. Its partly down to our vendor  / publisher relationships, partly down to in-house organisation and concepts A, B and C as outlined above come into play.

I’ll try and expand with concrete suggestions in follow-up posts.