Ten years ago we were still recovering from the anticlimax of the millennium bug, just ahead of the dotcom bubble bursting and Google’s announcement of their first billionth index entry.  Since then there has been a constant stream of Google prefixed applications and services, ‘i’ prefixed products, and more things suffixed with a 2.0 than you would want to count

Unsurprisingly, when the gang looked back, Google gets a mention or two, along with the rise of digital material.

The predictions for the future for libraries took on an interesting slant. The conversation, that ranged over radically different provision of future library services, raised the possibility of the one-to-one relationship between a library and an academic institution becoming a thing of the past.

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Our guest for this show is Meredith Farkas, Author of the book “Social Software in Libraries”.  A couple of years after publishing her book, Meredith has become a little jaded about the way libraries are using social software, with some libraries seeing it as a magic wand for community building and engaging with their users.  This chimed well with the thoughts of the Gang, who were drawn to the conclusion that like most software, it is just a tool.  How you use a tool to communicate with your users, is far more important than the tool itself.  Librarians wondering why their blog posts are not receiving comments, should be checking their content for comment-ability.

The Gang this month consists of John Blyberg, Char Booth,  Marshall Breeding, Nicole Engard, and Carl Grant.  After exploring the two main categories of social software, the recommendation/tagging/commenting systems and the Facebook/Twitter/blogging, the gang coalesced  around the notion that it is people that interact socially.  Speaking with a corporate voice, or just relying systems to do it for you, will probably not be enough.

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About a year ago dust started to stir on the surface of this stable landscape, when OCLC caused a curfuffle with their move to redefine their record reuse policy.  Then in January, open source library system vendor announced ‡Biblios.net, a free cataloguing service in which you can share with other libraries.  In the last few weeks we have had SkyRiver arrive on the scene.  Not much visible on their site yet, but according to press releases they hope to deliver quality at a lower costs  – so things are a changing.

Unfortunately nobody was available from OCLC, ‡Biblios, or SkyRiver, to help talk through what these moves might mean.  Nevertheless Gang members Marshall Breeding and Frances Haugen were on hand to explore the ramifications of these moves and what a more competitive landscape might mean for the players in this market.

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The ethos of the open source community is all about sharing innovation, code, resources, and ideas for the benefit of all.  The usual business model for these companies is for them to be contracted to create and locally enhance an instance of the software at a library.  It is usual for any enhancements to the system that are paid for by the contracting library, to be contributed back to the source code for the benefit of the whole community.

In comparison with the rest of the library world, supported by the traditional, closed source, vendors, the open source sector is still fairly small.   The question I put to the Gang this month was “Can the open source sector scale?”.  Will it be able to grow in it’s current form to become a significant alternative to the commercial vendors?

To help Carl Grant, Frances Haugen, and Marshall Breeding kick the topic around, we were joined by Brendan A. Gallagher, CEO of  ByWater Solutions.

Brendan’s introduction describing how a small company operated in this market formed the basis for a wide ranging discussion.  We touched on the motivations of those involved with open source systems, and whether there is a fundamental conflict between being a significant member of a community, and the operational realities of running a successful commercial organisation.   When comparing the successes of the wider open source world such as Mozilla and Linux, with comparative niche of library software there were key differences around size and leadership.

Latterly we moved on to external influences such as the current economic climate, and the evolution of the ILS market place away from what are the ILS systems today.  Another enlightening conversation around the virtual Gang table.

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The interest of the Gang this month (Marshall Breeding, Carl Grant, Frances Haugen) soon moved on from the student experience and current practicalities at NCSU, to the wider potential and impact of eBooks on the world of libraries.

There was some disagreement on timing, but all were clear as to size of revolution that readily available eBooks in open formats, on devices that add value to the reading experience, will have on libraries over the next few years. It may not be too long before the roles, of normal format and special request technical novelty, of the book and the eBook are reversed.

As a former project manager on Google Book Search, Frances provided some insights in to their experience in this area and the way the current settlement with authors and publishers going through legal processes at the moment will influence the spread of books in digital form in libraries.

Also announced in this month’s show were the three winners of the Mashup Idea Competition – check them out.

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Bibliocommons has spent the last couple of years realising their ambition of delivering a social OPAC service for Canadian libraries.  This centrally hosted service, although architected differently, shares the same motivations as John’s SOPAC project to add value to the OPAC user’s experience with social features.

Following an overview of each, gang regulars Nicole Engard, and Marshall Breeding joined in the conversation to discuss issues arising from these projects.  Although approached in different ways, they both experience similar concerns and both had to revisit their architecture to place social features at the core.   User ratings, opinions, tags, and lists of items become most value when brought to bare in relevance ranking calculations.  Their message came across loud and clear that  social features cannot be considered as a bolt-on OPAC feature.

One of the major concerns of librarians when first introduced to the concept of allowing users to add comments, ratings, and tags to their OPAC, is the need for moderation features to prevent users from defacing the library’s online presence.   Somewhat surprisingly, neither project had found this a problem and as yet neither have implemented functionality to manage it.

Many might imagine social OPAC features are just about reviews or only peripheral to the core library mission, both John and Beth have discovered it is about increasing the findability and better use of a library’s collections. There is more to this topic that what you might first imagine.

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As this month’s Gang – Tallin Bingham, Marshall Breeding, Nicole Engard, and Frances Haugen -  discuss, it is not just about adding interesting widgets to our interfaces.  These mashups depend on data being reliably available from within the library system and other external services in a form that is easy to understand and consume.  The mashup phenomena has spread so quickly because they are so easy to produce and the library world needs to follow that trend by agreeing some conventions  for the exposure of data – biblographic, usage, statistical, etc. – in a way that it easy for others to consume.  Many of the most successful mashups use data in a way that the publisher’s of that data did not initially envisage.

During the conversation the following were referenced:

• The Juice Project
• Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data – Edited by Nicole Engard
• SOAPAC – The Social OPAC

Competition  This month’s show launches the Library 2.0 Gang Mashup Idea competition.  To enter you need to send in your idea for a library mashup.  It can be as simple or complex as you like.  The only restriction being that it must include library data or functionality somewhere within it.  The best three, as judged by Nicole Engard and myself, will each receive a copy of the Library Mashups book she has edited.  Closing date is August 31st, send your entries to librarygang@talis.com.

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In an attempt to answer that speculation I took the unusual step of bringing together a specific set of Library 2.0 Gang members from that community as against our usual open house of whoever is available.  The result was an interesting conversation between Ex Libris’ Carl Grant, Nicole Engard from LibLime, Talis’ Rob Styles and newcomer from Axiell, Boris Zetterlund.

The initial reactions to hearing the announcement included “why did they take so long” and guarded “uh-ho”.  There were several aspects of, and reactions to, the announcement in the conversation – from welcoming the initiative, the inevitable move of library functionality to the cloud, questions about the size of library that would use it, the cost model, and of course issues about data and API availability.

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To give us an introduction in to the topic, our guest this month has a background in libraries having been a colleague of mine at Talis for several years.  Dr Paul Miller can now be found at Cloudofdata.com, working at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web, providing the insights that enable you to exploit the next wave as we approach the World Wide Database.

Paul provided us with an overview of what is meant by Cloud Computing, before the conversation moved on to the OCLC strategy to move library management services to Web scale.  Interpreting the OCLC announcement, it is clear that it is a approach to deliver hosted library management services from the  cloud in direct competition to the traditional ILS vendors such as SirsiDynix, Ex Libris, Innovative, Talis, and even those that OCLC have consumed over recent years.

Marshall shared with us the insight that in specifying the architecture for this initiative they had been working on a transaction rate sufficient to cope with the transactions of all libraries on the planet – an average of 5,000 per second.

This move from OCLC raises many questions and issues, not least of which is the potential impact on those traditional vendors.  How comfortable libraries will be adding back-office and patron’s personal data to the bibliographic data many already share with OCLC, being another one.

I’m certain that this will not be the only time that OCLC’s announcement in particular and Cloud Computing in general will feature on the Gang.  This month’s conversation is a great introduction to these topics and issues around them.

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From his perspective of his market analysis on Library Technology Guides, Marshall observed how surprisingly low is the number of libraries that are purchasing ERM systems.  Especially now we have reached the point that many academic libraries are spending over half of their budget on eContent, you would think that libraries would feel the need to buy systems to manage them. His view being that these tools need to be made better at managing the resources before the take up will increase

Oren, who has a long background with eContent systems, from the early days of SFX and OpenURL though his current position with Ex Libris a major supplier in this area, was an ideal Gang member to have on this show.  His view was that the mess actually has two sides to it: the world of electronic publishing with it’s very messy business models, terms, delivery platforms and standards compliance; and on the other side the organisational structures within libraries and the tools that have been built to help them manage the mess.  We [the industry] may need to look closely at the design of some of those systems as they may be helping to cause some of that mess.

The real question, as we have spent so long evolving in to a mess, is can we fix it or do we have to start again?  It was clear from the discussion that from the library side, the approach has been at the wrong level of granularity – approaching [initially] eJournal content at the level of the Journal itself as against the article which more often than not the target of a user’s discovery exercise.  This being aggravated by the approach of trying to catalogue the electronic in the same way as the physical – an article in an issue, of a volume, of a journal, on a virtual shelf.  Add to this a publishing industry going through massive change, doggedly trying to preserve and protect its old business model, whilst a few forward looking publishers try to work out what will replace it – no wonder we are in a mess.

The Gang go in to some depth discussing possible ways forward, with an emerging theme that if libraries are going to be able to manage their resources efficiently, they will have to move towards treating everything in the same way.  Be they books, physical journals, articles from eJournals, eBooks, papers in local repositories, data from research projects, or even associated software, libraries will need a constant way to manage all their current ‘stuff’ and the stuff we haven’t thought of yet.  There will also have to be a similar change in the publishing industry to accommodate the needs of the libraries if such a move is going to be successful.

Not such a gloomy outlook as you would at first think. Some of the analysis from the OLE Project [which we discussed in last month’s show] and from the URM project from Oren’s organisation are starting to address these issues.  The problem will be the few bumpy years to get us from the current unsatisfactory situation to where we want to be.

Note: Due to technical difficulties the recording quality is not as high as normal for which I apologise.

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