Ex Libris Initiatives Blog

Ex Libris Cloud: Open for Business

noreply@blogger.com (Sarit Kozokin) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 12:45:00 +0000

We have been focusing for the last few weeks on reaching the major milestone of establishing the Ex Libris Cloud environment. I am happy to report that those efforts are coming to fruition and that the Ex Libris Cloud is open for business. The third Alma Partner Release is being deployed, right on schedule, in the private cloud environment which will be introduced to our development partners for intensive training and testing during the coming weeks.

As the cloud environment serves as the basis for future technologies, we went to every length to establish a well formed environment. Our cloud services team, led by our new VP Cloud Services, has gained massive experience with hosting services – after all, over 1000 sites in North America alone are currently using hosted services offered by Ex Libris, such as Primo Central, bX and more. Their experience surely contributed to the success of the building of our cloud environment.

During the design and build of the cloud, the Alma development and product management team worked closely with the cloud services team to reinforce the guidelines of building a stable system. The environment conforms to leading industry standards in all levels and components. The cloud environment utilizes Alma’s multi tenancy architecture ensuring better performance to the customers. All of these measurements are implemented to verify customer's data is never lost, and service is never down.

As well as emphasizing system resiliency, we’re also constantly focusing on the need to secure the cloud. We're aware that security concerns are fundamental to the cloud environment and as such are always top priority for the cloud services team. Ex Libris has designed the multi-tiered security model which addresses major security concerns, such as personal data security and privacy. We also employ a full-time security officer, overseeing the whole process. You'll be able to read more about our cloud security in the Alma Security White Paper, to be published soon.

Another aspect of our cloud environment is the way we will be deploying software updates in line with the agile methodology that our development team practices. This methodology ensures that we minimize the time it takes Alma to adjust to market needs by having more frequent releases compared with traditional solutions, helping us to serve your needs faster. Watch this space for more on that in the coming weeks.

In short, I’m certain that our development partners will be enjoying our cloud environment with real peace of mind, ensuring that they can test the system as efficiently as possible.

Don't Stop Thinking About Digital Preservation

noreply@blogger.com (Ido Peled) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:51:00 +0000

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” was Bill Clinton’s two-time campaign theme, quoting the famous Fleetwood Mac song, and for me it aptly describes digital preservation as well. The need to constantly think and act to ensure access over time to digital content makes it completely different from everything we know about preservation in the paper world.

One of the things I’ve noticed was high on the wish list of any preservation-minded person is the need for speed and scalability. In fact we are now discovering more frequently that institutions’ digital collections are no longer measured in thousands but rather in millions and even billions of assets. Digital collections and the digital world have triggered a huge change in the way we work and think and will have an even greater impact on the way we need to plan for the future. If in the past an archivist or librarian could know by heart his entire collection and help in describing and manage it in the digital world, due to the mass we need a more robust and automatic flow in all parts of our work.

To make sure Rosetta, the Ex Libris digital preservation solution, can answer these requirements, we carried out a series of extensive scalability tests that included testing the rate in which digital items can be ingested, the volume of records in the system, the rate at which items can be delivered and viewed, and more. The tests were done in a two step approach: firstly, by running the tests in our lab here in Jerusalem and secondly, by validating the results on the Rosetta systems of a US customer.

I won’t tell you the whole story and the process (that you can find in the recently published white paper) just a short summary of the conclusions:

When calculating ingest throughput rates, many variables should be considered (files size, format variety, etc.). Rosetta can ingest many files in a short amount of time.
Computing power does make the difference, from dedicated server to virtual server, your results can vary very much
We have still not encountered a maximum limit of records. The system was tested with more than 50 million records and showed no sign of reaching the maximum limit.
It’s all about bottlenecks. Find the next one, fix it and move forward

In short, it was an interesting process of both learning and understanding the changing needs in the digital age. I invite all of you to read the white paper.

I started with one US president and will end with paying homage and reversing the words of another: Ask not what you can do with Rosetta; ask what Rosetta can do for you!

August's Dog Days

noreply@blogger.com (Nettie Lagace) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:29:00 +0000

Although for many of us, summer is our favorite season, there's something to be said for anticipating autumn. Here in New England we've been enjoying a warmer season than past summers so I for one am looking forward to cool nights and crispness again, if not a decrease in daily light. I can tell by the upticks in correspondence and other activities that our customers are now on their way back from their holidays and are planning for the start of the academic calendar -- at least in the northern hemisphere.

The bX scholarly article recommender has been having a hot summer too. We're now numbering over 300 institutions, including several of the very top academic sites in the world. We released development which allows bX to be utilized in various library interfaces and worked with customers of Serials Solutions 360 Link to include it in their service menus. Server stats are higher than ever. Feels like there's no stopping us!

And summer's not always calm for students either. This week I received a comment from Adam, a masters' student in engineering in the UK. (How many students take the time to write to the library software company?! Those engineers!)

But it was great fuel: "I have just used bX for the first time and am very impressed...I expected there to be a fair bit of repetition between the suggestions and my existing results [saved in RefWorks], but to my surprise and delight the tool returned many papers I had not yet seen...this is a very promising development and seems already quite powerful. I would love to see continued development of this tool and look forward to using it in the future."

Well, Adam, we look forward to developing it for you!

As students return to school, this could be a prime time to run a free 30-day trial of bX and add a feedback link to the service. You just might be surprised at what they say!

URM first partner release; first seeds planted

noreply@blogger.com (Sarit Kozokin) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:44:00 +0000

The last few weeks have been very exciting for Ex Libris and the URM team. In mid-June the first partner release of the URM system was successfully deployed, on schedule, at our development partner sites. We're calling it a partner release as it's only available to our partner sites. Since then we have carried out training and the first cycle of data migration. This is a major milestone in the URM development project!

Because URM is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS), which takes the hosted model further than ever before, it provides a low-cost, efficient infrastructure, without the customer having to invest in hardware, configuration or maintenance costs. As part of the first partner release, the URM team and development partners are evaluating the Amazon public cloud as a potential hosting infrastructure (other hosting options may be evaluated in future releases).

The development partners have been introduced to the new and attractive web-based UI of the system. When we first explored the system, what excited us most about the UI is its contemporary and intuitive look-and-feel. The design team has done a wonderful job of defining coherent workflows for some pretty complex tasks. The lobby in the main screen, which is divided into logical sections, leads the user straight to the menu he needs. Everything is a few clicks away!

This partner release includes a selection of modules and workflows, including circulation desk activities, user management, staff search, acquisition flows, and activities in the system’s repository. The range of the available functionalities shows that the development team is making terrific progress, enabling the user to test major functions in the system, even in this early stage.
Each partner is using a sandbox environment to view and explore URM. The partners can see their own data, which was migrated from their legacy systems, enabling them to test and experience the system as close to real life as possible.

The URM release team, dedicated to implementation and communication with the partners, which we are part of, is working closely with our partners to gather their feedback on the system. We are currently guiding them through the system to ensure they explore and feel comfortable with the system’s features.

This joint project with the development partners—kicked-off with this first partner release of URM—continues the Ex Libris tradition of collaborating with our customer community at a very early stage of product development, making the customers part of the product’s evolution.

Scheduled for mid-November, the next partner release (the second of five) will include a wide range of functionalities and features. Stay tuned for more information on the progress of URM development. We will try to keep up with the pace of the project!

Sarit Kozokin and David Zyroff, URM Product Release Team

A conundrum...

noreply@blogger.com (Kathryn Harnish) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:45:00 +0000

It would be almost impossible for Ex Libris and our URM development partners to build a next-generation library management solution without asking a lot of challenging questions and continually repeating the mantra of “Think Differently!” It goes without saying that much has happened in the years since the current generation of library management products was developed –technology is advancing, suppliers are consolidating, and library goals are changing. As we design a system that can accommodate the current and future needs of libraries, it can be a challenge to balance the “traditional” workflows and processes that we’ve become accustomed to – and, in many cases, that we’ve optimized – with opportunities to do things in different ways.

As we’ve worked with our URM development partners, one area that has become the source of – shall we say lively? – discussion is the metadata editor and, in particular, the MARC cataloging interface.

On the one hand, we know that the demands of a production cataloging environment call for rapid data entry – and many libraries have optimized their workflows to ensure the greatest productivity in this regard. Further, many of our current cataloging tools and practices can be traced back to the days of terminal-based systems. While the library community has reaped countless benefits in moving away from those legacy systems, the environment often did make it easier to perform data-entry intensive tasks. Many catalogers still prefer a more text-based user interface, with options for keyboard-driven commands and navigation, for exactly this reason. As one of our partners noted, “The most repetitive part of a cataloger’s job is the encoding – and once you know the rules for creating and editing a MARC record, anything that slows down that process causes a lot of frustration.”

On the other, in a next-generation environment, we have opportunities to introduce new efficiencies by moving away from a text-based interface. With a new, more “element-based” editor, the URM could assist users in the entry of controlled values in appropriate record fields and subfields. For new or less-experienced staff, learning how to describe the library’s resources could be simplified through the use of text-labeled elements that link to contextualized online help resources. And beginning to work in a new editing environment will also likely pave the way for the implementation of new XML-based metadata formats, something that is of increasing interest to our partners and to the larger library community.

The possible opportunities in a next-generation environment prompted Ex Libris and our development partners to consider a trade-off: should we stick with what works for us now, or should we move toward a different interface that supports new efficiencies? And this question was only further complicated as we looked to the future – a future in which other types of record formats are likely to predominate and in which shared, community-centric metadata (supported by the URM’s Metadata Management System) will play a huge role.

This certainly hasn’t been the only tough question we’ve had to address in planning URM functionality, but because it touches an area in which productivity is so important, it’s been one of the hardest. After quite a bit of consideration and evaluation, our development team came up with a solution that will work best for the product and its users, one that elegantly combines the benefits of a text-based editor with many of the features enabled by an element-based editor. As an example, the URM MARC editor will support index look-ups, even in fields with multiple subfields. We feel that this solution supports the best of both worlds – providing new efficiencies without compromising on the productivity we’ve achieved in our current cataloging environments.

Kathryn

Coming to Life: Agile Development and the URM

noreply@blogger.com (Kathryn Harnish) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:18:00 +0000

One of the most exciting parts of being a product manager is getting to see your “baby” come to life – and last week ended with one of those moments for me. But I’m getting ahead of myself; let’s start at the beginning…

In building the URM, Ex Libris is applying a number of “agile development” techniques. For those of you unfamiliar with this methodology, it’s a newer approach to software development that emphasizes rapid, yet high-quality delivery; ongoing review and adaptation; and a business approach that aligns product development with customer needs and company goals. The goal is to create an agile process (hence the name) that allows us to review and test our work as we go, modifying the URM functionality as needed to meet our success criteria.

From a product management perspective, the URM team works closely with our colleagues in development to prioritize the functionality that is added to the product in a series of month-long development iterations or “sprints”. Ultimately, these sprints are packaged into a “drop” – a set of end-to-end workflows across functional areas that can be implemented and tested with real data by our partners. As part of this process, we’ll be creating an ongoing cycle of feedback and adjustments based on our partners’ experiences. Our first drop will be delivered to our URM partner libraries in June of this year, with successive drops approximately every 3-4 months thereafter until our last drop – the complete v. 1 release – in the second half of next year.

And, because we’re building upon the proven infrastructure of Rosetta, Ex Libris’s solution for preservation of digital assets, we have a huge “leg up” on many of the core pieces of functionality necessary in the URM – things like operator management and privileges, the inventory model, and more are already in place and ready to go with little or no modification required.

Which brings me to last week. My colleagues in development finished the first official URM sprint, which included a number of demonstrable features. While I had an opportunity to review a lot of work, including the infrastructure for user interfaces and menu systems, the thing that made me really happy is the implementation of currency management services. Now why get excited about, of all things, currency management? Well, I’ve always wanted an acquisitions module that would automatically query an external currency service and update the conversion rates. And in January, the URM development team made it happen! For the many libraries that order in multiple currencies, the URM will eliminate all of the manual work that’s currently necessary to ensure accurate, real-time commitments and expenditures in selection and acquisition. Hear, hear!

We also finalized our planning for February’s sprint last week, and I can’t wait to see – and provide feedback on – this month’s deliverables. Stay tuned for more information on the URM…and the new features that are evolving even as I write!

Kathryn

Welcome Primo Central Library Partners

noreply@blogger.com (Ex Libris) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:10:00 +0000

As 2009 draws to a close, we are taking a moment to look back, with amazement, at the extraordinary developments in the library discovery environment. It is less than a year ago that services such as Primo Central—offering scholars the wealth of global e-content integrated with local library collections—started to emerge. Of all the stakeholders that have embraced this new approach, it is the publishers who should be most applauded for their positive response to this way of enhancing the discoverability of their content. Last week we were pleased to announce the first Primo Central partner libraries. Here’s the list:

- Brigham Young University (United States)
- Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium)
- Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg—KOBV Consortium institutions: Humboldt University, Free University of Berlin, Mannheim University, and the Technological University, Berlin (Germany)
- Michiana Academic Library Consortium institutions: University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary's College, Holy Cross College, and Bethel College (United States)
- Oxford University (United Kingdom)
- University of New South Wales (Australia)
- Vanderbilt University (United States)
- Yonsei University (South Korea)

This international group of library partners, representing scholarly excellence across the globe, will begin beta-testing Primo Central next month and check how this new service works with the institutional Primo system. A wonderful advantage of having such a heterogeneous group of partners is that they can help us learn how well we address language issues, regional content, a variety of organizational structures, and a range of disciplinary focuses. We’re looking forward to working with our partners and receiving their valuable feedback.

The Primo Central index continues to grow. More and more publishers are joining the many who already participate in the Primo Central Publisher program. Within just the last two weeks, we signed agreements to add scholarly content from Cambridge University Press, the University of Chicago Press, Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., JSTOR, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), RMIT Publishing, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. By the time Primo Central is released to the general public, we anticipate that this index will include approximately half a billion records.

We are pleased that so many distinguished publishers understand that Primo Central is another way for them to enhance the “findability” of their treasures without losing control of their intellectual rights and are thus working with us to get their data into Primo Central. Ex Libris, libraries, and information providers all share a common vision: bringing the world of knowledge to users. And the Primo Central service--an Ex Libris initiative that will benefit both libraries and information providers--fulfills this goal perfectly.

Continuing the collaboration – Our First URM Solution Review Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (Ex Libris) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:12:00 +0000

On September 22nd and 23rd, members of the Ex Libris URM team were joined by over a dozen staff from our [now FOUR!] Collaborative Development Partners for a Solution Review meeting on cataloging and metadata management in the URM [Unified Resource Management]. The three original Partners – Boston College, Princeton University and KU Leuven [Belgium] were recently joined by Purdue University, who signed on as a URM Partner only a few days prior to the scheduled meetings. Welcome Purdue! We held the meetings at the Firestone Library on the campus of Princeton University during two days of Indian summer.

The Solution Review is the first of two major milestone meetings Ex Libris will be having with Partners for each of the major “tracks” we have set up for URM: Cataloging/Metadata Management, Selection/Acquisitions, Fulfillment/Patron Management and Digital Content. The second series of milestone meetings will focus on Design Review for each of the tracks.

The primary goal of the two day meeting was for Ex Libris to review with the Partners our planned cataloging solution for URM, seeking input and feedback throughout. We encouraged and received wide participation by the staff from the Partner libraries as we discussed the functionality of cataloging and metadata management, reviewed early mock-ups and analyzed workflows. The packed agenda had major sessions on:

Current metadata practices and workflows
Community zone use cases
Import – both bulk and individual – of records
Searching capabilities
Editing of metadata and resource records
Authority control and related processing
Publishing and dissemination of records to external sources and environments
The role of Registries in managing metadata
Catalog sharing within the URM.

We kicked off the meetings with a high level review of our goals for metadata management in the URM:

Centralize descriptive metadata for all resources libraries manage—print, electronic, and digital
Reduce redundant work across many institutions
Improve metadata through joint upkeep
Streamline time-consuming processes
Create a platform for meaningful management of disparate descriptive standards.

To make this more concrete, we reviewed with the Partners what we see as some of the most important questions we need to answer across the board as we develop URM:

What are the problems you need to solve?
What do you want to be able to do MORE of?
What would you like to ELIMINATE?
What are the NEW things you want to be able to do NOW and in the FUTURE?

We revisited these questions, and their answers, throughout the course of the discussions, trying our best to stay true to the goals and objectives of the URM even as we discussed quite detailed points of functionality.

Thanks to John Larson, Dana Shavit-Moscovitz and Asaf Kline of Ex Libris for the hard work they did preparing for the meetings. Thanks to the staff at Princeton who made our stay there so pleasant, particularly the hastily arranged tour of the new Lewis Library designed by Frank Gehry. And, heartiest thanks to the staff from Princeton, Boston College, Leuven and Purdue who attended the meeting and contributed so openly.

Susan Stearns
Ex Libris

New service, new reactions

noreply@blogger.com (Nettie Lagace) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:29:00 +0000

I've been spending some time over the last few weeks calling up some of our bX customers and getting their reactions to the new scholarly article recommender service they've implemented for their users. These conversations are essential to me in my job as product manager, to better understand what changes we can/should make in bX, to make it the best it can be. Definitely, everyone finds bX a fascinating concept but often they are not really sure what will happen when they implement it.

While these conversations have not been terribly long, they've all managed to bring new and unique perspectives. Different comments for sure, but everyone is looking forward to the new school term starting next month (for most places) and introducing bX to their new and returning students.

In some institutions, the reactions so far have been mainly by librarians - I attribute that to the academic calendar right now. Several of these librarians have been impressed about how easy bX is to use - the recommendations simply appear and the user may click on them. "Anyone who is familiar with Amazon knows exactly what to do." This technique is observed by the librarians to be quite intuitive and useful, particularly for new users, unfamiliar with library interfaces (and in some cases what they are actually looking for!).

One library created a small feedback form specifically for bX - it appears just above their recommendation section on the SFX menu. They passed on some feedback from PhD users (researching through the summer, ugh...) which made me smile from ear to ear for the rest of the day: "this is fabulous" came from one; another wrote a bit more: "I found exactly what I wanted. I've already found even more relevant articles in 10 minutes than I've found in the last 10 months using more traditional methods of research." Wow!

Even though bX is focused on maximizing the implicit feedback of end users (through use of SFX usage statistics), you just can't beat the explicit feedback, can you!? We can't wait for the autumn, when more students can use this.

ALA was a blast for bX!

noreply@blogger.com (Nettie Lagace) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Last week, we proudly presented the new bX scholarly recommender service to customers and prospects at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual conference in Chicago. This was the first ALA for bX, now that it's out of development and in production at many libraries, so it was a very exciting time for all Ex Libris staff involved, to be able to show it, talk about it "for real," and inform those interested that it's immediately available.

There was a lot of interest at the Ex Libris booth -- Loralynne Evans, our North American marketing manager, had made up colorful badges in order to prompt questions, and they worked! We showed many live demos of the bX service at the booth, and even had opportunities to chat about it while standing in line for lunch at the Au Bon Pain downstairs in the convention center.

Marshall Breeding, noted library industry journalist, wrote about bX for the next issue of "Smart Libraries Newsletter." Thanks to the agreement of ALA TechSource, we were able to print copies of this article for distribution at the booth.

In addition to the booth demos, we also held a separate session, dedicated to bX, in the Chicago Hilton on Sunday morning. Many dozens of customers and prospects found their way to the "basement ballroom" in order to hear a three-part presentation which featured Bob Gerrity from Boston College and Oren Beit-Arie and me from Ex Libris.

Oren was the set-up man: he talked about the importance of user contribution in online environments; changes going on in scholarly communication; how recommender systems in general enhance discovery processes; how bX recommendations are generated and how we are really just at the beginning of more intelligent applications of aggregate usage data.

Bob, of course, spoke from the library point of view; he described Boston College's approach to its library users and how the staff fosters a willingness to experiment, as well as how the BC librarians feel that library contribution of data to aggregate data sets is important for improvement of services. He also described BC's participation in the bX alpha testing program earlier this year and how its (picky! detail-oriented!) subject librarians contributed to the test and verified quality of recommendations.

I showed screenshots and live demos of the service from various bX customer libraries as well as the steps for the registration process. Here's just a few...
Aalborg University
Boston College
Stellenbosch University
University of Calgary

Audience members were enthused and peppered us with questions covering all aspects of the system; many indicated an intention to buy in time for the new school term which is fast approaching.

We are all looking forward to continuing bX on its worldly way -- over 100 sites from Australia to China to USA to Finland to Israel to Canada to South Africa (15 countries so far) have signed up to license or trial the service since its launch!

Primo Central—more data for discovery, better service to end users, less hassle for libraries

noreply@blogger.com (Ex Libris) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:21:00 +0000

We are very happy to announce today the introduction of a new Primo component, Primo Central. Primo Central indexes scholarly materials such as articles and e-books provided by publishers and aggregators, and is seamlessly integrated into local Primo systems. Primo Central will be managed by Ex Libris as a service available to all Primo customers.

Primo is designed from the outset as a tool for libraries and librarians, focusing on the uniqueness of each library and the particular way that libraries make information discovery work for their communities of users. To support the needs of hundreds of different libraries and the varying ways in which information providers enable their data, Primo offers a range of search technologies including ‘native’ search of local and remote Primo indexes and metasearch of licensed resources. Primo Central complements the Primo searching capabilities by enabling a library to offer fast, effective, and seamless access to the entire library offering. With Primo Central, users will be able to transparently search in locally-managed collections and global e-content with the search results blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Primo enables libraries to leverage the power of the network and the community through this inclusion of shared content, while maintaining the freedom to achieve superior results for their users in the way best for them--all of this with little, if any, effort by the library.

E-content in Primo Central can be configured locally to determine the search scope, restricting this to subscribed resources only, or broadening this to extend beyond the library’s collection, particularly where pay-per-view options may enable users to reach the requested material. Similarly, search results can be filtered to show only those results for which full-text is available to the user. Real-time availability is ‘built-in’.

Ex Libris will be working with library partners on the ongoing development of Primo Central which will be in beta release at the end of 2009. For those of you attending the upcoming ALA Conference in Chicago, don't forget to attend the Primo presentation or see a preview of Primo Central at the Ex Libris booth #1015.

To find out more about Primo Central, visit the Ex Libris Website.

How does your digital preservation initiative compare?

noreply@blogger.com (mike thuman) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:17:00 +0000

Most libraries and archives who are learning about, planning or implementing a digital preservation initiative pause, at least once in awhile, to wonder; how do they compare to their peers? Are they doing better, worse; are they covering all the essential points? We’ve recently begun conducting a series of regional symposia on Digital Preservation that help in this regard. Our goal in doing this is to help libraries and archives understand the needs, challenges and possibilities surrounding digital preservation and to do so in a forum where peers can freely share information. The results have been interesting and insightful.

At a high level, the question being asked by all is: How will we guarantee the authenticity and accessibility of the terabytes and now petabytes of all of the digital content we are now creating? Steve Knight of the National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ), the lead speaker at one symposium, discussed how NLNZ had gone though all of the phases of documenting the business requirements, analyzing “build versus buy” strategies, explaining and positioning open source/proprietary/open platform solutions to NLNZ directors, training the organization on preservation standards, and through a partnership with Ex Libris, going live with Rosetta - a workflow-based digital preservation infrastructure that provides both access and long-term preservation.

Also of interest was the fact that half of the attendees believed that digital preservation is really just preservation dealing with yet another new information format. (See our previous blog post on this subject at http://commentary.exlibrisgroup.com/2009/05/libraries-choosing-to-end-preservation.html ). Digital preservation (or the ability to guarantee long term access to digital content) is a new discipline in many ways and one that comes with new questions. For instance: a) how do we create a digital preservation policy? b) how do we plan for digital preservation? c) how do we build the business case? d) how do we orchestrate a program and eventually go live with a workflow based solution? During the symposium, answers were discussed among attendees, including such things as best-practices, Web-based resources that exist, and actual experiences.

On the next topic of digital preservation standards, polling results showed that although most institutions are planning to use and follow the OAIS (Open Archival Information Systems) reference model, few had actually been formally trained in OAIS. One could spend days reading the OAIS documentation, but not find answers on how to implement a digital preservation infrastructure, how to build the policy, or how to plan each and every critical step. The good news is that there are now on-site and Web-based training classes ranging from 1 day to multi-day, interactive and/or workshop sessions (for additional information on training, please contact your local Ex Libris office.

The next question showed that nearly all libraries are digitizing and nearly everyone is putting content somewhere, most in some type of repository. Digitization is viewed as a “socially acceptable” way of preserving documents that define your institution’s reputation or possibly defend and protect your institution from legal and regulatory issues. Of course this method of preservation does not address content that is born-digital or the processes needed to authenticate and render all content in the coming decades.

The final polling question showed that many of us are still “flying under the radar” in our respective institutions. Despite all of the hard work and planning going on in the area of digital preservation, only a few of the symposium attendees could say that digital preservation was a stated priority of the senior management in their institution. Although the poll in our symposium showed about half of the attendees had already built or could build a business case for digital preservation, there was only one participant that responded positively to the question; does a written digital preservation policy exist in your institution? It is clear to us all that we need to learn how to express the need for digital preservation as a solid business case.

These symposiums have shown that there is a lot more work for all of us to do in making digital preservation a priority that will get the resources it needs. While some institutions are further along than others, most are just at the beginning stages.

How does your digital preservation initiative compare?

On community and collaboration

noreply@blogger.com (Susan Stearns) — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:14:00 +0000

One of the concepts that is integral to the URM project here at Ex Libris is that of integrating new models for community and collaboration. Libraries have traditionally been well-grounded in collaboration: reciprocal borrowing of many flavors has existed for decades; consortia of various types have evolved to support resource sharing and to facilitate joint purchasing, particularly of e-resources. Collaboration models have expanded more recently to address the strain on libraries’ physical space through shared off-side storage repositories. And a number of libraries are putting renewed focus on expanding collaboration between libraries and museums/archives, supported by increased federal funding.

Today’s libraries are looking even more closely at extending and expanding collaborative efforts and at new ways of creating and expanding the concept of community within and across their services. We are seeing this already in the implementation of Primo as customers look to engage more closely with users, opening up tagging and reviews for user-contributed content, and focusing on the communities where users are: integrating Primo content on Facebook and other discovery spaces as well as providing apps for the iPhone and other mobile devices.

And, as Jenny Walker has described in other postings, the new bX Recommender Service from Ex Libris, which mines information from customer contributed SFX usage logs, further expands the “power of the networked scholarly community”.

As we develop the URM, we continually look to ways that community and collaboration should be integrated. This starts, of course, with the collaboration we do within the library community. Well before we wrote the first requirements documents or code, Ex Libris was engaging with customers and the community at large. Our interviews with libraries throughout the world and our discussions with customers in small groups have informed URM in more ways than we can count. We don’t always agree of course and we cannot always accommodate all of the good ideas. But, we are listening and looking to work in close collaboration with the community as we develop URM.

We are interested in hearing from you – what are the types of support for collaboration and community you believe are required of a next generation framework such as URM?

Susan

A Productive -- and Exciting -- ELUNA

noreply@blogger.com (Kathryn Harnish) — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:09:00 +0000

ELUNA 2009 has almost come and gone – the meeting always seems to go so quickly, probably because I keep so busy over the three days with interesting conversations about what’s happening at Ex Libris and in libraries that use our solutions.

This conference was no exception, especially since we’ve been sharing lots more about our URM plans to very positive response. We kicked the URM “thread” of the conference off with Oren Beit-Arie’s keynote address, which situated the changing world of libraries in the larger context of academic trends. Oren addressed the needs for collaboration within and outside of the library environment, focusing on the opportunities to improve traditional activities, explore “transitional” functionality, and ultimately, to provide transformational services. Tying these to “real-life” examples of URM features, Oren provided a great context for URM discussions throughout the meeting. (For some additional perspective by a conference-goer, check out Simon Bendall’s blog post on the keynote.)

My colleagues, Nettie Lagace and Susan Stearns, and I also had the opportunity to host “subject matter” review sessions throughout the conference. We were pleased to show more details about our URM plans (and even prototypes) in a number of areas – monographic acquisitions, metadata management, electronic resource management, fulfillment services, and more. We were gratified by the level of interest in these sessions – they were all filled to capacity – and happy to get very thoughtful feedback on our work to date. If you weren’t able to attend ELUNA or one of these sessions, never fear – we’ll be offering lots of opportunities to check out our plans and offer your thoughts as our efforts continue. You’ll also see some follow-up to some of the discussions that were initiated in these sessions in the coming weeks here on the blog.

We’re just about to head off for home – only a few more sessions to go, and ELUNA will wrap up for another year. In addition to my suitcase, I’ll be taking home lots of great ideas to incorporate into our thinking, amazing energy from the positive responses to our URM plans, and reinforcement that our vision for next-generation library services will support libraries in both the traditional and transformative ways necessary for future success.

Until next time,

Kathryn

bX is launched. The next 'killer app’?

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:36:00 +0000

As some of you already know, this week we launched the bX scholarly article recommender service in a public beta mode. Those Ex Libris customers attending the ELUNA user group meeting in Richmond this week may already have seen one of the bX demos and share the sentiments of one twitterer who, after seeing a demo described bX as ”It's Amazon meets JSTOR”, and further urged others to see this in their comment ”Definitely worth checking out.” This follows the recent posting to the SFX listserv by David Walker of CalState libraries ” The new bX service has a real potential to be the next killer app -- SFX was the last killer app, in case you were wondering ;-)” We at Ex Libris are really excited about this, and look forward to many libraries joining the bX community.

For the past several months we have been working with twenty prestigious institutions from around the world that have contributed their SFX usage logs and have worked with us in the testing and further development of this service. This really cool service is now available to all libraries everywhere.

To find out more about the bX service and to subscribe to bX, visit the Ex Libris Web site. Current SFX users can subscribe online via SFXAdmin.

New Framework for a Changing World

noreply@blogger.com (Kathryn Harnish) — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:32:00 +0000

In my role as the Director of URM Product Management, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with librarians about the changes afoot in the industry – and about the kinds of back-office managmeent systems that will be necessary for “next-generation libraries”. It’s been an exciting and informative process – at a time of unprecedented change, I’ve seen many examples of how our community is responding with creativity, innovation, and enthusiasm.

In these discussions, I’ve had the opportunity to share Ex Libris’s vision for a next-generation library services framework, which Oren introduced in a previous post, and the URM conceptual model in particular. The model illustrates many of the ways in which the framework is designed to efficiently and effectively manage the full lifecycle of all types of resources, regardless of format or acquisition method, at significantly lower costs than libraries incur today. We’ve recently published a white paper on our URM Resource Center that provides some additional details about the URM, and I’d encourage anyone with an interest in our plans for Unified Resource Management to check this out. In future posts, we’ll share more details about specific aspects of the framework – if a particular aspect of the model piques your interest, let me know and we’ll talk about it here!

As many of you know, Ex Libris has been talking with the library community about URM for quite awhile – formally at user group meetings (including this week in Richmond, Virginia), ALA, and other conferences, and research interviews; informally through our everyday conversations with staff at Ex Libris libraries. Moving forward in the design and development of next-generation services, we’ll use this blog and other channels to continue this process. So, to kick things off:

At the conclusion of the white paper, we note that the changing needs of libraries demand a new framework to support not just new ways of doing today’s tasks, but to enable new kinds of library services and functions. We suggest some emerging opportunities in the white paper, but would also like to invite you to share thoughts about the kinds of new activities on your library’s agenda and the impact these things will have on your current library practices. Specifically:

How do you see the role of the library in your particular institution changing in the next five years?
What new initiatives and services do you anticipate offering to your community as a result of these changes?

I’m eager to hear what’s on your mind and look forward to continuing conversations on this topic!

Until next time,

Kathryn

On the air. On the ground.

noreply@blogger.com (oren beit-arie) — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:57:00 +0000

Next week, Ex Libris’s North American user group, ELUNA, will convene in Richmond, Virginia, where I’ve been asked to give a keynote session on trends affecting next-generation library services and our plans in this realm. This will be a great opportunity to reflect on the transformational change facing not just libraries, but academia as a whole – and to posit some specific ideas about how Ex Libris can bring new solutions to bear in this environment. As I’ve prepared for this session, I’ve taken some time to read again a number of reports on this topic – No Brief Candle, the 2009 EDUCASE/NMC Horizon Report, ARL/CNI’s “Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future” forum, and more – which reinforce once again that it’s no longer a question of whether change is necessary, but how and what we, as a community, must do to achieve that change.

This is a question for which Ex Libris has actively been seeking answers. For several years, we’ve been engaged with the library community and other stakeholders to understand the future role of the academic and research libraries and to respond with solutions that support the processes, services, and data required for that future. In doing so, we’ve worked hard to balance future needs with current requirements, making it possible for libraries to make the necessary revolution in an evolutionary way. Ex Libris quickly understood that, in order to support this transition, libraries needed a new framework, a new model for library services that focuses on the emerging trends and needs of the future while continuing to address the needs of today. As a result, our vision includes three main components: User Services, Management Services, and Transformational Services that take libraries beyond their traditional roles.

Our first stage in the development of new library solutions was Primo, a unified resource discovery and delivery (URD²) platform introduced in 2007. With Primo, we took a critical step in defining the library systems architecture of the future by decoupling the user experience from back-end management of resources. This offers tremendous flexibility in how libraries expose the richness of their collections while also simplifying the discovery process for both local and remote resources. Primo represents an important milestone in a library’s evolution by providing next-generation services to the library’s users.

Now, we are in the process of revolutionizing the library’s administrative, back-office management of all assets -- regardless of their format, type and acquisition method -- with our Unified Resource Management (URM) framework. As a result of many conversations with librarians around the world, we know that the changing environment demands tools that support both “doing things differently” as well as “doing different things”. The URM provides the open and extensible platform necessary to help your library meet current, emerging, and future needs for library management.

Finally, I feel strongly that Ex Libris’s job will not be complete if we don’t expand our focus beyond traditional library tasks; we must continue to support innovation within and transformation of libraries by delivering services that will respond to the core mission of their parent organizations. Already, you can see clear steps we’ve take to develop new solutions in this domain: Rosetta, our digital preservation platform; bX; and more to come.

For those of you headed to ELUNA, I look forward to seeing you – and continuing these discussions – next week. But we also want to take advantage of this new blog environment to broaden the conversation, to share thoughts and to hear your ideas, about next-generation library services. These interesting times present a great opportunity to define and build our future – a future that requires active collaboration between all of the stakeholders in our community for success.

The OpenURL framework. Again.

noreply@blogger.com (oren beit-arie) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:58:00 +0000

In one of my recent bX talks, I presented the idea that bX represents a new component of the OpenURL framework. I would like to explain this a bit further.

bX relates to the OpenURL framework in a number of ways:

1. The bX repository is an aggregate of OpenURL-based usage data.

In bX, we collect usage data from multiple OpenURL link resolvers (starting with SFX). As each of these link resolver reflects activities of users in multiple information systems/environments, in effect, bX creates a “supper aggregation” of aggregated usage data.

2. Usage data transported to the bX is encoded in an OpenURL context-object format.

bX harvests (using OAI-PMH) usage data which is encoded as ContextObjects (based on the OpenURL standard). It was important for us to ensure that usage-data that feeds into bX will be designed in a way that will enable maximum participation and interoperability, hence bX’s use of the OpenURL and the OAI-PMH standards. This means that many other information resources and link servers (other than SFX) could relatively easily participate in the bX framework.

3. The bX query protocol uses the OpenURL standard.

Any client application can send an OpenURL request to bX in order to receive a list of recommendations. The ContextObject describes the article for which recommendations are requested. bX can respond in a range of XML formats (including RSS and ATOM feeds). Since the bX reflects usage patterns of multiple scholarly information environments, the articles recommended by bX will include articles from other content systems, not just the one from which the bX recommendation request was received.

Why is this important?

As we know all too well, the scholarly information space is highly distributed, with resources scattered across multiple databases, journals, article repositories, etc. - most of them vendor-controlled.

The OpenURL framework, and more specifically link resolvers such as SFX, address this issue by offering interoperability across disparate information sources. OpenURL enables the information-seeking user to traverse a universe of resources scattered across multiple platforms, systems, and vendors - in a manner that is completely agnostic to any proprietary constraints.

In effect, bX, just like SFX, presents relations between scholarly items that transcend the boundaries of their business provision. bX and SFX can both be considered as ‘overlay’ services.

bX and the Open Platform Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:19:00 +0000

Paula Hane , Information Today, Inc.'s news bureau chief and editor of NewsBreaks. writes about bX in her recent article titled ‘Ex Libris Advances Its Open Platform Strategy’ . In this same article – as the title suggests – she also talks about the Ex Libris Open Platform Program and the company’s commitment to openness as a core value.

In line with this strategy of openness, bX provides an API to enable local applications to interact with the bX server and retrieve article recommendations. Results can be returned in XML, RSS and Atom formats as preferred. The use of the bX API has already been demonstrated in a test mode by David Walker at California State University, a bX test partner. See example below showing the Xerxes interface with bX recommendations (Related Articles) embedded in the interface. Xerxes is a system developed by David Walker that leverages the Metalib X-Server, WorldCat API and other web services to create a custom search-and-link library portal.

bX at the Bielefeld conference

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:37:00 +0000

I read with great interest a blog posting reporting on Herbert Van de Sompel’s closing keynote speech at the 9th International Bielefeld Conference in Germany this week. The posting is entitled ‘Herbert’s Adventures in Linking’ and reports on Herbert’s review of the last 10 years of key initiatives in which he has been involved; and the resulting standards that have emerged.

Unfortunately despite the 20 minutes time extension for his presentation, Herbert did not manage to cover his work on bX, though I am assured the audience saw the slides as Herbert flipped through these! I hope that those of you attending the Bielefeld conference did manage to hear my colleague, Axel Katsche, present on bX.

bX is very much part of an Ex Libris journey (and an adventure) that started in the late 1990’s with the Ghent University Executive Lounge and Herbert’s work to link SilverPlatter databases to the Aleph OPAC. In 2000, Ex Libris acquired the SFX linking technology from Ghent University, and created the SFX product as we know it today and now installed in over 1700 sites. We also played a key role together with Herbert in the development of the OpenURL framework and its submission to NISO as a potential standard. The OpenURL became a NISO standard in 2004. All this in turn laid down the infrastructure for bX, the scholarly recommender service based on the mining of the SFX/OpenURL usage logs.

bX has already collected link resolver usage data from institutions around the world based on many years of research activity at those institutions resulting in millions of transactions. The bX scholarly recommender services will be just the start of a range of potential services derived from this data.

Ex Libris Announces bX: Usage-Based Scholarly Recommendation Service

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:44:00 +0000

We are very excited to announce bX -- a first-of-its-kind service to provide library users with article-level recommendations based on collective usage data amassed from research communities around the world.

bX is the result of years of research and collaboration into advanced scholarly recommender systems conducted by leading researchers Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The bX service derives its recommendations from the analysis of tens of millions of transactions performed by users from research institutions worldwide and captured through a large-scale aggregation of link resolver usage logs. Based on open interoperability standards such as OpenURL and OAI-PMH, bX can be tightly integrated into a library’s existing user environment.

Sixteen institutions in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia have begun testing bX and are working with Ex Libris to ready the service for public launch. Early users of bX have expressed high level of enthusiasm with the service and its premises.

Marvin Pollard of the California State University consortium said: “We view this service as an extremely important piece of the triangle of the discovery/ recommendation/ fulfillment process. This is the next ‘killer app‘ from Ex Libris and follows on the success of SFX. Just as SFX has become an essential, powerful tool in connecting our researchers to the resources they need, we are confident that bX will provide our users with the recommendations they need to support their research.”

Professor Jiang Airong of Tsinghua University Library in Beijing commented that “in today’s research environment, which is characterized by exponential growth in the volume of online resources, new tools for discovery are required, as well as new methods for evaluating scholarly material. The bX recommender service is a valuable first step for our users.”

Bob Gerrity of Boston College expressed his appreciation for the “great opportunity provided for the library to participate in the building of new, value-added services based on the analysis of user behavior. We see tremendous potential in the role of recommender services such as bX in the discovery process.”

Further commenting on the collaborative nature of the project, Sue Clarke of Australia’s Monash University noted that “the bX service is a good example of how Ex Libris is working with customers to shape and develop future directions in which the system learns from users’ searching patterns.”

“bX represents an important step toward a range of new services that leverage the collective input of the vast scholarly community as well as widely deployed library tools,” said Oren Beit-Arie, chief strategy officer of Ex Libris Group. “The bX journey started with the introduction of the OpenURL framework 10 years ago and followed with SFX, which has become the most commonly used OpenURL link resolver. Now bX mines the wealth of information contained in the usage logs of link resolvers such as SFX for the benefit of users and librarians alike. We are very excited to be working in collaboration with librarians and researchers on this important and ground-breaking library service.”

ALA seminar announced: Supercharge Your Researchers with Recommendations for Scholarly Articles

noreply@blogger.com (Eran Livneh) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:30:00 +0000

If you are attending the ALA Midwinter meeting, you have a unique opportunity to find out about an exciting new service coming soon from Ex Libris. The bX Recommender taps into the power of the networked scholarly community to generate recommendations for scholarly articles based on article usage.

The session will be led by Oren Beit-Arie and Jenny Walker, Ex Libris.

Saturday, January 24
10:30 a.m. - Noon
Hyatt Regency Hotel, Capitol Ballroom 5/6

Register online to attend.