Serials Solutions CARLI Breakfast
The CARLI consortium has contracted for the Serials Solutions 360 Resource Manager and 360 Counter. Jane Burke showed the full 360 set of systems which includes more like the a-z list and link resolver, etc. but she concentrated on these two. This is Software as a Service, hosted on the vendor server. It is an ERM to control info about what the library subscribes to and what the licensing restrictions are, etc. The counter lets the library combine usage statistics from various vendors and run lots of interesting reports. Another staff member went into more detail CARLI will fund training and implementation services for members.
OCLC Webscale services
Presented by Andrew Pace this is about development of Circ, Acq and ERM add-ons to OCLC Worldcat Local. In April 2009 they announced a “Quickstart” strategy to get libs to sign up for worldcat local. Now he is concentrating on a Knowledgebase for ERM and Lib management systems for Acq and Circ. He cited Fred Kilgore’s original plan to put all parts of the ILS online but said OCLC had failed to offer circ systems because they don’t do well supporting systems run out in the libraries (He got corrected from the floor later. Acq and Serials Control were offered centrally online and were migrated off to local ACQ350, SC350 systems, maybe Andrew is too young to remember). He was suggesting there would be new workflows and they would not preserve old workflows. He actually made the comparison to something you would just plug in. So Circ, Acq and ERM will become plug and play modules that run on the central OCLC servers. He thinks this will “free” libraries and will reduce the Total Cost of Ownership. He claimed Open source would have a lot of overhead. He said this OCLC system would be SOA to interactw tihe student registration and course management systems.
Circ will not change, Acq is an opportunity to change adding ERM, license management. He sees an opportunity for “cooperative intelligence” for consortial fund management, collection development, recommender systems based on circulation in various libraries. I have a problem with this. If you think about concerns people have about commercial sites like Google collecting a lot of information about people who use it and using that information without the knowledge or consent of those users, are we really supposed to trust OCLC with sensitive fund information and assume they will use that wisely and in our interest? I actually asked about what if OCLC becomes a monopoly with circ, etc. and jacks up the price. they are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts so what would prevent them from price gauging. Andrew said he had goodness in his heart and that the “collective” would be responsible. I’m part of the OCLC “collective” now. I don’t feel I have any control over it when they decide to raise their prices. One of my colleagues, Chris Cronin, asked about whether Open Source wasn’t the way to go if this was offered as a “collective” thing. Andrew answered that they used open source software for some of the pieces, and OCLC Developer’s network is supposed to encourage community development. He did not say they would open source the code for these new systems. He did emphasize that the library’s data is the library’s data and what goes in must go out also.
Next steps are a Library Advisory Council (I don’t believe there were any ARL size librareis); a Steering committee of more handson types of librarians. 3 pilot sites, Idaho community libraries, Orbis Cascade Linfield College and Pepperdine University. A public library will be added. they are using agile programming methodology. System configuration is implemented as part of the Worldcat Local quickstart. Circ will test from this month to mid 2010. License manager due late 2009, and Print and electronic acquisitions the beginning of 2010. He referred to his blog for more info.
In response to questions he claimed all people hate Circ tables and mentioned “finite administrative setups.” There would be “Service Level Agreements” with OCLC that would cover some privacy issues. For library fund coes he thought libraries should work towares “homogeniety”. He mentioned Marshall Breedings suggestion that the Borrower db become a “Customer relationship db”. They will have Acq in a year, selective rollout of the whole ILS replacement FY 2011 and scaled rollout after that.
I am not do not like the forced lowest denominator approach. I think this attitude is what is driving libraries to Open Source systems. To pay a large amount of support only to be told what you CANNOT do in a system is straining the patience of libraries. I certainly think the next set of systems will be leaner and have fewer bells and whistles but the limitations of a vendor run system cannot be allowed to dictate what a library can do for circulation policies or use of funds. For lots of libraries they loan for a period. For very large academics, you loan for the whole quarter or semester and allow recall when something is needed. This is because the primary users are doing in depth research in unique areas. For funds some libraries might just use a few. Some large sites may have elaborate and extensive funds for endowments where they have received gifts of money to purchase materials. This might be regularized if it amounted to a few thousand dollars of purchases each year, but where it is hundreds of thousands of dollars of purchases a library will not be forced to stop receiving and reporting on such funds just because other libraries don’t do it that way. That is not what I would call progress. This vendor insistence that they know the best way for you and stuff it if you don’t agree is not something people are willing to put up with any more. So I believe for a lot of libraries this approach will not work. Some of the borrower and acquisitions data also just may not be appropriately stored at the level of OCLC Worldcat. Even the circ data has privacy issues that are controlled by state legislation in some instances.
LITA NGCIG Post Integrated Library Systems: The Open Library Environment (OLE) and the Unified Resource Management (URM) Projects
Oren Beit-Aire and Kathryn Harnish from Ex Libris spoke first. Much of this information is available on their website. Oren mentioned a need to accomodate escience data in the next 5 years although I’m not sure exactly where that fit in. There are charts of the architecture, there is an URD2 which is essentially Primo, and a URM for the management of print and electronic and “new types” of data. This represents the “decoupling” of front and back ends of the old ILS. There is another box for the Data Sources including metadate, usage data, the Knowledgedb, Vendor Info, Tags and Reviews. this is a shared, “community” source not local to the library, managed by ExLibris or a “community of users”. [My colleague Janet Fox, said, they did that whole presentation without mentioning OCLC. Are they putting up a share db in competition to OCLC? like the old RLIN? Or like the biblios.net that LibLime has put up?] He called this DaaS Data as a Service and made the point that no restrictions would be put on use and reuse of the data.
It is to be an open platform, it is SOA, supports ‘collaboration of choice’. Kathryn went on to talking about putting ebooks in a ‘community zone’ while print would be local. She showed a ‘cataloging lobby’ and a workform that included RDA elements. There are forums for users to ask questions (biblios.net has that). They want to support new uses like collaborative collection development. Princeton, Boston College and a Belgian site are helping with development. \
John Little spoke about the OLE project. They use a “community source” rather than “open source” model. They are looking for build partners who would decide what features are built in the first 2 years and the code would not be open for others to use/modify until later. Initial design will be availabe later this month on the OLE web site. They want a reference implementation up by mid 2011. That will have only what the build partners agree should be in the first release. John said they can meet this deadline because they will build on top of the Kuali Rice middleware for nervous system, system bus, enterprise workflow, enterprise notification, id management. The will contract out the programming of the library app to workers in Bulgaria. there will be a single project manager here. this is based on Kuali Coesus Research Administration system. That was developed in this manner, outsourcing the coding to India. He also mentioned useing the CUFFS ERM Knowledgebase. The system will not provide a discovery layer, a library would use Worldcat Local, VuFind, Blacklight, eXtensible catalog, Primo …
Build partners will decide what gets coded first. Interested libraries include Indiana, UPenn, Duke but none are announced partners yet. They want 5-7 partners. Cost is 185K to 260K per year depending on number of partners. Partners would need to put part of system in production and contribute staff resources as well. John said according to Mellon none of their projects has failed and they have yielded 35 to 90% cost savings to institutions. Benefits to build parners are access to emerging technologies, use monetary resources in a productive and directly influencial fashion, leverage ROI on campus for enterprise systems. He commened his staff were enthused about working on new systems. Secondary benefits are exposure, staff enrichment, productivity and a culture of strategic innovation.
Oren did point out that many universities don’t use Kuali so in reality you don’t get to incorporate Acquisitions into an enterprise wide system.
LibraryThing
There was a demo at the Bowker booth of Library Thing for Libraries. There are 53 million tags. Penntags in 3 years added only as many as get added to LT in a day. there are 42 million books and 750K members. Terms like “chick lit” help public libs to supplement subject headings. For academic libs new terms and terms not in LCSH can be helpful, liek “social capital”. linking is not restricted to ISBN, uses LCCN, OCLC no, author/title. He also showed how you can vet reviews from your own users and you can show only yours, only ones from library catalogs or all reviews from LibraryThing. Bowdoin College has a good example. It is just a piece of javascript on a screen and CSS is used ot configure it. There are excellent stats on what is used and you can import those stats to Excel. All reviews are moderated, looked at. You have to look at your own or pay them to do it. There is a Facebook App so people can feature what they reviewed at their library and link back to the library as they share lists with others.
Ingram Lightning Source
They had the Espresso machine printing books. It took about 5 min for a 169 p. book. Prints from PDFs. Prints anything in the Lightning Source db. I talked to one of the salesmen for My iLibrary. For ebooks, publisers were charging 150% of hard copy price. This year it is 120%, he expects it to be even next year. They have a deal with Springer to provide POD Print on Demand, and they are getting that deal with other publishers who want to publish e-only but allow an option to print. Espresso costs $80-100K. It’s out there in about 20 sites they had listed. There has to be annual maintenance on the machine as well.
