Library spring

OR11: Misc notes

2011-07-02T09:21:00.001+02:00

I like going to conferences alone, it’s much easier to meet new people from all over the world than when you’re with a group, groups tend to cling together. With a multitracking conference like OR11 however, the downside is that there’s so much to miss. Especially since I like to check out sessions from fields I’m not familiar with. At OR11, I wanted to take the pulse of DSpace and Eprints, and not just faithfully stick with the Fedora talks.

In this entry, I focus on bits and bobs I found noteworthy, rather than give a complete description. I skip over sessions that were excellent but have already widely covered elsewhere (for instance at library jester) such as Clifford Lynch closing plenary.

“Sheer Curation” of Experiments: data, process and provenance, Mark Hedges
slides [pdf]

"Sheer curation" is meant to be lightweight, with curation quietly integrated in the normal workflow. The scientific process is complex with many intermediate steps that are discarded. The deposit at the end approach misses these. Goal of this JISC project is to capture provenance experimental structure. It follows up on Scarp (2007-2009).

I really liked the pragmatic approach (I've written this sentence often - I really like pragmatism!). As the researchers tend to work on a single machine and heavily use the file system hierarchy, they wrote a program that runs as a background process on the scientists’ computer. Quite a lot of metadata can be captured from log files, headers, filenames. Notably, it also helps that much work on metadata and vocabulary has already been done in the field in the form of limited practices and standards.

Being pragmatic also means discarding nice-to-haves such as persistent identifiers. That would require the researchers to standardise beyond their own computer and that’s asking too much.

The final lesson learned sounded familiar: it took more, much more time than anticipated to find out what it is the researchers really want.

SWORD v2

SWORD2: looks promising and useful, and actually rather simple. Keeping the S was a design constraint. Hey, otherwise we’d end up with Word, and one is more than enough!

Version 2 will do full Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD). Though a service can always be configured to deny a certain actions. It’s modelled on Google’s Gdata and makes an elegant use of Resource Maps and dedicated action URLs.

CottageLabs, one of the design partners, made a really introduction video to Sword v2 demonstrating how it works:

It looks really useful and indeed still easy (as per Einstein's famous quip, as simple as possible but not simpler). If you’re a techie, dive into SwordApp.org. If you’re not, just add Sword compliance to your project requirements!

Ethicshare & Humbox, two sessions on community building

Two examples of successful subject-oriented communities that feature a repository, each with some good ideas to nick.

Ethicshare is a community repository that aggregates social features for bioethics:

one of the project partners is a computer scientist who studies social communities. Because of this mutual interest (for the programmer it’s more than just a job) they have had the resources to fine tune the site.
the field has a strong professional society that they closely work with.
glitches at beginning were a strong deterrent to success - so yes, release early and often, but not with crippling bugs!
the most popular feature is a folder for gathering links, and many people choose to make them public (it’s private by default).
before offering it to the whole site, new features are tried out on a small, active group of around 30 testers.
for the next grant phase they needed more users quickly, so they bought ads. $300 for Facebook ads yielded for 500 clickthroughs, $2000 Google ads 5000. This (likely) contributed to number of unique visitors rising from 4k to 20k per month. Tentative conclusion: these ads cost relatively little and are effective for such a specialized subject, the targeting is really quite good.

Lessons from the UK based Humbox project:

approach: analyse what scientists were doing already in real life, in paper and file cabinets, mimic it and extend it.
"the repository is not about research papers, it is about the people who write them": the profile page is the heart, putting the user at the centre. Like Facebook’s, it has two distinct views: an outside version about you (to show off), and internal version for you (with your interests). This reminds me of the success of the original, pre-yahoo delicious, which also cleverly put self-interest first with the social sharing as a side-effect.
Find a need that's not covered by existing systems: Humbox fills a need to share stuff, not just with students - for that the LCMS is the natural place to go to - but with colleagues, since the course-centric nature of LCMS’s tends to lock colleagues out.
Most feedback came from community workshops. Participants often became local evangelists.
Comments often were corrections. 60% of the authors changed a resource after a comment - and the 40% comments not leading to a correction also include positives, so the attitude towards criticism was quite positive.
over 50% of users modified or augmented material from others, sometimes reuploading it to the site.
Humbox only takes Creative Commons licenses, with an educational side-effect: some users indicated they also started looking in other places (such as flickr) for cc material as a result.

The Learning Registry: “Social Networking for Metadata”
slides [google docs]

I just want to mention this for the sheer scope and size of this initiative. It’s [explicative] ambitious.

The aim to gather all social networking metadata! To limit the scope, they won’t do normalising, or offer search or a query api, that's all left to the users of the gathered dataset. But all, they mean everything on the net: data, metadata and paradata (by which I understand they mean the relationships with other data).

Agreements are in the works with major partners (see last slide). The big elephant in the room was Facebook (no surprise, sigh) which wasn’t mentioned at all. (as I'm writing this, Google+ has just been announced, there is some hope after all of the slightly creepy evil eventually triumphing over the even more evil).

They call their approach a do-ocracy. Very agile design principles. Real-time everything in the open: all code and specs are written directly in Google Docs (table of contents, a google spreadsheet). NoSQL master-master storage system, well thought-out architecture, production will run on ec2. Everything will be open, except data harvested from commercial partners.

Something to keep an eye on: www.learningregistry.org.

Finally...

MODS is the new DC. In recent projects, MODS seems to have replaced Dublin Core as the baseline standard for metadata exchange. Interesting development.

OR11: New in EPrints 3.3: large scale research data, and the Bazaar.

2011-06-29T13:08:00.002+02:00

As I mentioned in the overview, I was very impressed by what's happening in the Eprints community. The new features of the upcoming 3.3 are impressive as they seem to strike the right balance between pragmatism and innovation. Thanks to an outstandingly enthousiastic and open developer community, they're giving DSpace (and to a lesser extend Duraspace) a run for the money.

"Energize":
could've been the motto of the Eprints community

Support for research data repositories

The new large scale research data is also a hallmark for pragmatic simplicity. EPrints avoid getting very explicit about subject data classification and control, taking a generic approach that can be extended.

Research data can come in two container datatypes, ‘Dataset’ and ‘Experiment’. A Dataset is a standalone, one-off collection of data. The metadata reflects the collection. The object can contains one or more documents, and must also have a read-me file attached, which is a human-oriented manifest, as, though machine-oriented complex metadata is possible, it would deter actual use.

The other datatype is Experiment. This describes a structural process that may result in many datasets. The metadata reflects process and supports the Open Provenance Model.

Where the standard metadata don’t suffice, one of the data streams belonging to the object can be an xml file. If I understood correctly, xpath expressions can then be used for querying and browsing. Effectively this unleashes the shackles of the standard metadata definitions and creates flexibility similar to Fedora. It's very similar to what we're trying to do in the FLUOR project with a SAKAI plugin that acts as a GUI for a data repository in Fedora. Combining user-friendliness with configurable, flexible metadata schemes is a tough one to pull off, I'll certainly keep an eye out on the way EPrints accomplishes this.

The Bazaar

The EPrints Bazaar is plug-in management system and/or an ‘App Store’ for EPrints, inspired by Wordpress. For an administrator it's fully GUI driven, versatile and pretty fool-proof. For developers it looks pretty easy to develop for (I had no trouble following the example with my rusty coding skills).

The primary design goal was that the repository including API must always stay up. They’re clever bastards: they based the plug-in structure on the Debian package mechanism, including the tests for dependencies and conflicts, which makes it very stable. Internally, they’ve run it for six months without a single interruption. Now that’s eating your own dog food!

Off the beaten track

EPrints as a CRIS

The third major new functionality of 3.3 is CERIF import & export. Primarily this is meant to link eprints repositories automatically to CRIS systems, but for smaller institutions that need to comply with reports in CERIF format but don’t have a system yet, using eprints itself may suffice as pretty much all the necessary metadata is in there. The big question is whether the import/export would allow a full lossless roundtrip, as I joined this session halfway (after an enthousiastic tweet prompted me to change rooms) I might've missed that.

This sounds very appealing to me. Unfortuntaly, the situation in the Netherlands is very different, as a CRIS has been mandatory for decades for the Dutch Universities. Right now we’re in the middle of an European tender for a new, nationwide system, and the only thing I can say is that it’s not without problems. How I’d love to experiment with this instead in my institution, but alas, that won't be possible politically

The EPrints attitude

As Les Carr couldn’t make it stateside, he presented it from the UK. The way this was set up was typical for the can-do attitude of the eprints developers: Skypeing in to a laptop which was put before a mike, and whenever the next slide was needed Les would cheerily call out ‘next slide please!’, after which the stateside companion theatrically reached out for the spacebar of the other laptop, connected to the beamer. Avoid neat technology for technology’s sake and keep it simple and effective.

OR11: opening plenary

2011-06-22T16:49:00.000+02:00

See also: OR11 overview

The opening session by Jim Jagielski, President of the Apache Software Foundation, focussed on how to make an open source development project viable, whether it produces code or concepts. As El Reg reports today, doing open source is hard. The ASF has a unique experience in running open projects (see also is apache open by rule). Much nodding in agreement all around, as what he said made good sense, but hard to put in practice. Some choice advise:

Communication is all-important. Despite all the new media that come and go, the mailing list still is king. Any communication that happens elsewhere - wikis, IRC, blogs, twitter, FB, etc - needs to be (re)posted to the list before it officially exists and can be considered. A mailing list is a communication channel which is asynchronous and participants can control themselves, meaning read or skip it at their time of choice, not the time mandated by the medium. A searchable archive of the list is a must.

Software development needs a meritocracy. Merit is built up over time. It’s important that merit never expires, as much open source committers are volunteers who need to be able to take time off when life gets in the way (babies, job change, etc).

You need at least three active committers. Why three? So they can take a vote without getting stuck. You also need ‘enough eyeballs’ to go over a patch or proposal. A vote at ASF needs minimally three positive votes and no negatives.
To create a community, you also need a ‘shepherd’, someone who is knowledgable yet approachable by newbies. It’s vital to keep a community open, so not to let the talent pool become too small. To stay attractive, that you need to find out what’s the ‘itch’ that your audience wants to scratch.

The more 'idealistic' software licenses (GPL and all) are "a boon firstmost to lawyers", because the terms ‘share alike’ and ‘commercial use’ are not (yet) clear in juridical context. Choosing an idealistic license can limit the size of the community for projects where companies play a major role. A commenter added that this mirrors the problems of the Creative Commons licenses. In a way, the apache license mirrors CCzero, which CC created to tackle those.

Open Repositories 2011 overview

2011-06-21T21:01:00.010+02:00

Open Repositories was great this year. Good atmosphere, lots of interesting news, good fun. It's hard to make a selection from 49k of notes (in raw utf8 txt!). This post is a general overview, more details (and specific topics) will follow later.

Texas State History Museu

My key points:

1. Focus on building healthy open source communities

The keynote by Jim Jagielski, President of the Apache Software Foundation, set the tone for much what was to come. An interesting talk on how to create viable open source projects from a real expert. The points raised in this talk came back often in panel discussions, audience questions and presentations later.
More details here.

2. The Fedora frameworks are growing up

Both Hydra and Islandora now have a growing installed base, commercial support available, and a thriving ecosystem. They've had to learn the lessons on open source building the hard way, but they have their act together. Fez and Muradora were only mentioned in the context of migrating away.
Also, several Fedora projects that don't use Hydra still use the Hydra Content Model. If this trend of standardizing on a small number of de facto standard CM's, that would greatly ease mixing and moving between Fedora middleware layers.

3. Eprints’ pragmatic approach: surprisingly effective and versatile

Out of curiosity I attended several EPrints sessions, and I was pleasantly surprised, if not stunned by what was shown. Especially the support for research data repositories looks to strike the right balance between supporting complex data and metadata types, while keeping it simple and very usable out-of-the box. And also the Bazaar, which tops Wordpress in ease of maintainance and installation, but on a a solid engineering base that's inspired by Debian's package manager. Very impressive!
More details here.

Texans take 'em by the horns!

Misc. notes
See part #3: Misc notes

Elsewhere on the web

OR11 Conference program, presentations.
Richard Davis, ULCC: #1 overview, #2 the Developers Challenge, #3: eprints vs. dspace.
Disruptive Library Technology Jester day 1, day 2, day 3.
Leslie Johnson - a good round-up with focus on practical solutions.
#or11 Tweet archive on twapperkeeper

Photosets: bigD, keitabando, yours truly, all Flickr images tagged with or11, Adrian Stevenson (warning: FB!).

Other observations

Unlike OR09, the audience was not very international. Italians and Belgians were relatively overrepresented with three and six respectively. I spotted just one German, one Swede and one Swiss, and I was the lone Dutchman. The UK was the exception, though many were presenters of JISC funded projects, which usually have budget allocated for knowledge dissemmination.

As OR alternates between Europe and the US, the ratio of participants tends to be weighed to the 'native continent' anyway. But the recession seems to be hitting travel budgets hard in Europe now.
As there were interesting presentations from Japan, Hong Kong and New Zealand, the rumour floating around that OR12 might be in Asia sounded attractive, I'd be very curious to hear more about what's going on there in repositories and open access. The location of OR12 should be announced within a month, let's see.

[updated June 27th, added more links to other writeups; updated June 28, added Hydra CM uptake]

2011-06-20T13:43:00.001+02:00

Catching up on old news, I came across an interesting presentation on CNI this spring on the Data Management Plans initiative. Abstract, recording of the presentation on youtube, slides.

DMP online is a great starting point (and one of the inspirations for CARDS) and this looks like the right group of partners to extend it into a truly generic resource. What's notable about the presentation is also the sensible reasons outlined for collaboration between this quite large group of prestigious institutions.All in all, something to keep an eye on.

Don't panic! Or, further thoughts on the mobile challenge

2010-10-05T17:16:00.000+02:00

Two weeks ago, I posted some notes on the CILIP executive briefing on 'the mobile challenge', where I presented the effort of my library, the quick-wins 'UBA Mobiel' project. Those notes concentrated on the talks on the day. Now that it's had time to simmer (and a quick autumn holiday), I want to add some reflection on the general theme.

Which basically boils down to Don't Panic (preferably in large, friendly letters on the cover).

Is there really such a thing as a 'mobile challenge' for libraries? Well, yes and no. Yes, the use of internet on mobile devices is growing fast, and is adding a new way of searching and using information for everyone, including library patrons. The potential of 'always on' is staggering. And it is a challenge.

However, it is also just another challenge. After twenty years of continuous disruption, starting with on-line databases, then web 1.0 and web 2.0, change is not new any more. Libraries are still gateways to information, rare and/or expensive (the definition of expensive and rare depending and varying on the context, also changing of course). And the potential of the paperless office may finally come to fruit with the advent of the iPad, but meanwhile printer makers are having a boon selling ever more ink at ridiculous prices.

So, what to do?

There are three ways to adapt. On one side are the forerunners, with full focus on the new and shiny. Forerunners get the spotlights, and tend to be extroverts that make good presentations. However, not everyone can be in front - it would get pretty crowded. It takes resources, both money and a special kind of staff. Two prominent examples given at several of the Cilip talks were NCSU and DOK Delft. Kudos to them, they're each doing exciting stuff, but they are also the usual suspects, and that's no coincidence.

On the other extreme, there's not changing at all. For the institution, a certain road to obsolescence. For a number of library staff the easy way to retirement. Fortunately, their number seems to be rapidly dwindling, but nevertheless, finding the right staff to fulfil the jobs at libraries or publishers when the descriptions of these jobs are in flux was a much talked about topic, both in the talks and in the breaks.

In practice, most libraries are performing a balancing act in between. And it is perfectly acceptable to be in the middle. Keep an eye on things. Stay informed. Make sure your staff gets some time to play with the toys that the customers are walking around with, and if they find out what's on offer in the library is out of sync, do something about it.

[from tuesday tech]

Which is pretty much what we did with UBA Mobiel. Nothing worlds hattering, not breaking the bank. We're certainly not running in front, but we're making sure our most important content (according to the customers) is usable. This way, when the chance comes along to do Something Utterly Terrific (Birmingham) or merely a Next Step Forward (upgrading our CMS) we know what to focus on.

The response on our humble little project has been very positive. We may have hit a nerve, and I'm really glad to hear that it is inspiring others to get going. Go-Go Gadget Libraries!

Becoming upwardly mobile - a Cilip executive briefing

2010-09-17T14:43:00.001+02:00

Cilip office in Bloomsbury, London

On September 15, Cilip (the UK Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and OCLC held a meeting on the challenge that mobile technology proves for libraries, called Becoming upwardly mobile Executive Briefing.

The attendees came from the British Isles (UK and Ireland). Some of the speakers however came from elsewhere. Representing The Netherlands, I presented the UBA Mobiel project as a case study, which went well.

The mere fact that I was asked to present our small low-key project - which in the end cost less than 1100 euro and 200 hours - as a case study along the new public library in Birmingham with a budget of 179 million pounds sterling shows how diverse the subject 'the mobile challenge' is.

Thus the talks varied widely, and especially the panel discussion suffered from a lack of focus. It was interesting nevertheless.

Attendees were encouraged to turn their mobiles on and tweet away, and a fair number of them did. See Twitter archive for #mobexec at twapperkeeper.

1. Adam Blackwood, JISC RSC

A nice wide-ranging introduction in a pleasant presentation, using lots of lego animation. In one word: convergence. To show what a modern smartphone can do, he emptied his pockets, then went on from a big backpack, until the table in front of him was covered with equipment, a medical reference, an atlas and so on. "And one more thing…". The versatility of the devices coming at us means not only that current practices will be replaced, but also that they are going to merge in unexpected ways. Reading a textbook online is a different experience from reading it on paper, for instance. Augmented reality (in the broad sense of the word, not just the futuristic goggles) is a huge enabler that we should not block by sticking to old rules (such as asking to turn devices off in the library or during lectures).

As for the demoes, it's a bit unfortunate that it always seem to be the same that are pointed to (NCSU, DoK), though they're still great. Using widgetbox to quickly create mobile websites was new to me, worth checking out further (the example was ad-enabled, hope they have a paid version, too).

All in all, a great rallying of the troops.

2. Brian Gambles, Birmingham

A talk about the new public library in Birmingham. An ambitious undertaking, inspired by amongst others the new Amsterdam public library. The new library should put Birmingham on the cultural map, and itself become one of the major touristic attractions for the city, opening in 2013. It's also meant to 'open up' the vast heritage collection (the largest collection of rare books and photography of any public library in Europe). And to pay for it, they'll have to monetize those as well.

A laudable goal, great looking plans, I wish them luck in these difficult times.

The library is not just the books (the new Kansas city library sends all the wrong messages). The mobile strategy comes forth from the general strategy: open up services and let others do the applications. Open data, etc. They are working with apple to get on iTunesU for instance (partnership with the uni). Get inspiration from cultural sector, many interesting & much downloaded apps have come from museums. Notable especially is the Street museum of London (flash-y-website, direct iTunes ap link)

Also, can't afford to hire enough cataloguers for the special collections - open up this as well, let crowdsurfing as a helpful tool. Surprised that there are people that like to correct OCR texts, which he thinks is a dreadful chore. So let's use it.

3. Panel discussion.

This wasn't as good as it could have been unfortunately, due to the wide range of the topic. Still some interesting points:

Adrian Northover-Smith from Sony of course very much pro e-ink devices and against the iPad. It's a cultural challenge for the company that their e-reader customers are female and older, most of their wares are peddled to young males. In a way, not dissimilar to libraries adjusting to the new 'digital native' generations, especially those catering to students.

Q: mobile use for people with visual impairment? A: epub format allows for more formats, larger letters, reading aloud. In some studies (art, fashion) up to 30% of students are dyslectic, and they're helped greatly by different presentation from the content. (DH: this is yet another field in which rights are the big hurdle, given the skirmishes over audiobook vs text-to-speach rights...).

Simon Bell from the British Library talked about the challenge of mass digitization. The definition of availability is shifting, and digital born data is especially volatile. Mobile access is just another form of presenting content, the content comes first now.

Jonathan Glasspool from Bloomsbury Academic talked about the publishing point of view. He presented a new platform for online publishing, using CC licenses to allow non-commercial use online. I'm curious how this compares to the European OApen project in which our uni participates.

In his view, the main challenge today is that the industry needs a new type of people. Bloomsbury has weekly voluntary 'elevenses' sessions, where staff can brief each other on new ideas and online uses they found, which seem to work well as a motivator.

Simon Bains and bevanpaul noted via tweets that there seems to be a big divide between those focussing on generating content versus those interested in new platforms, and I agree. You can't have one without the other, it's a chicken & egg situation. On the other hand, the reality is that the size of the problems are so big that to get anything done, focus is needed.

Brian Gambles mentioned that railway ticket machines were recently redesigned to deal with the visual impaired, resulting in a design that's much better for everyone. Better to incorporate it from the start: "accessibility should be in the DNA of new products".

4. Jeff Penka, OCLC worldwide

As I was preparing for my own talk, only a few notes. The main point of technology is barrier elimination for the user. We tend to think in systems, in details, jargon and acronyms: ILS, OPAC, SFX. The user just thinks a button should be "Get it". See also the importance of 'one-click' shopping in the Amazon and iTunes stores: such a seemingly small step key to dominance.

The worldcat mobile interface is very 'beta' - every 2-3 days a new release, to try things out. Expected to stabilize in spring 2011 though. An interesting remark: OCLC believes that a mobile interface should not come as an extra, at a high cost. Rimshot! Too many vendors are trying to squeeze their clients by doing exactly that.

5. Driek Heesakkers on Uba Mobiel

Download the presentation (licensed under creative commons BY-NC-SA).

Then it was my turn. I presented our small 'agile' project. See the presentation. It will be described in more detail in the upcoming book 'Catalogue 2.0' - A little ironic, as one of the themes of the day was that the catalogue is much less important to the users as it is to library professionals.

To summarize: by giving space to enthusiastic early adopters amongst staff, in the form of a low-overhead, fast-moving project that focuses on possible quick wins, a library can bridge the gap for the current transition period. In the long term, vendors will come up with solutions that present content (whether a catalogue, website or digitized objects) equally well in a mobile content as in others. This will take a while though, and in the meanwhile we can't afford that our services are (nearly) unusable on a mobile device.

Basically, the message is "just do it" - it will be easier than you think!

6. Benoit Maison on Pic2shop

A highly specialized topic. The pic2shop application offers an interesting way of merging functionality that web apps can't access (in this case, barcode scanning) with regular web apps. In the case of their worldcat enabled scanner, a user can scan a book (in a bookstore I presume), the app then passes the code on to an external website which does something useful with it (looks it up in worldcat) and the app displays the result from this website inside the app interface. To the user it's transparant, for the developer it's relatively light-weight.

It's an elegant concept. Might be useful for other specific device functionality that can't be accessed via web apps as well, though there are currently no plans for that.

The day ended with a session on augmented reality by Lester Madden, who did a good job I heard. Unfortunately my flight connection was too tight to stay for this one. The flight experience was pretty bad anyway... next time Eurostar for me!

Finally, for a little balance: on the same day, Aaron Tay wrote A few heretical thoughts about library, which deals amongst other things with the relative unimportance of mobile use at the moment. To a certain extent he has a point. It's not bad to stop for a moment and check if you're just following the pack.

Notes from CNI Spring meeting 2010

2010-05-04T16:53:00.005+02:00

I was fortunate to attend the CNI Spring 2010 Task force meeting in Baltimore, USA. This was my second time at a CNI, the first one being 2007. Compared to my previous experience, it struck me how policy has come to dominate the program, where it used to be technology. Maybe it’s because the direction where we’re heading is clear - complex objects, enriched publications, open access - and the question is now how we to get there.

Because the fragmented setup of research and academia in the US differs greatly from the situation elsewhere, this made the meeting more US-centric, which was a tad disappointing. However, it remains an interesting, intense pressure-cooker, of which afterwards it’s hard to believe it barely lasted a day and a half. Worth the jetlag.

Two sessions stood out for me. First one was a presentation by Jane Mandelbaum from the Library of Congress on a collaboration with Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (iCME), to create “Metadata remediation tools” (great name!): generating summaries, short titles and geographical data from wads of text.

iCME is located in Silicon Valley, has close ties with companies there - Google, Yahoo, and small start-ups - and deals primarily with algorithms to understand text, especially with taxonomies. (which seems to be exactly what Google is trying, too, according to Steven Levy’s april 2010 article in Wired).

Interesting, as we’ve tried this in my organization, and failed miserably. This was made to work, though it took two years (!) to iron out the wrinkles between two very different cultures. Also, it’s not an equal partnership; most of the coding takes place in summer jobs, paid for by LoC. Main reason is the nature of LoC’s metadata, in which collections exist that differ greatly but are internally consistent, which makes them good candidates to refine algorithms on.

Results for LoC: apart from the code (rough around the edges, scripts rather than applications) and the generated geographical and other metadata, insight in the usefulness and value-for-money of metadata.

Software via the projectsite: http://cads.stanford.edu/

Example of unexpected results, visualization of keyword patterns: http://cads.stanford.edu/lcshgalaxy/more.html

The other session I want to mention was on Cornell’s LoL approach. Taking the Library Outside the Library: A Light-weight Innovation Model for Heavy-weight Economic Times.

An incubator-approach, outside regular channels, to quickly respond to trends. This presentation struck a chord with the audience, at moments there was an audible roar of keypresses as dozens of people typed in notable phrases in their twitter, blogging clients or notepads. One of those was when a quote from The Simpsons’ Krusty the Clown came up: "It's not just good, it's good enough!", another was the motto “there is no blame in trying something that doesn't work”. Clearly those struck a chord.

I like the setup: a small group, consisting of staff from all departments, including circulation and rare books, that spend max 5% of their time. Membership is limited to two years. The group runs 3-5 risky projects, categorized as “from trivial to easy”.

Examples: putting PD image collections on flickr and youtube, POD books from those flickr streams with Blurb, maintaining Wikipedia pages, iPhone app (made by a CS student). For mobile devices they use Siruna. Some projects were successful, some not. When projects finish succesfully, they are transferred to the regular organization; if that doesn’t work, they are killed off rather than letting them languish or peter out, as that would be discouraging.

Very pragmatic and useful - and worth copying!

Finally, the lively Twitter traffic is archived at twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/cni10s

The Red Room: workflow photo tour

2010-02-22T14:34:00.003+01:00

(part two in a short series)

In response to questions on the RFID_LIB list, I created a short photo tour of the red room, focussing on the staff side of things: the types of crate used, usability issues we encountered etc.

I've used the full range of Flickr metadata to describe the issues, unfortunately the slideshow doesn't show descriptions by default, and notes not at all. So best viewed as set: Flickr Red Room.

Alternatively, when watching the slideshow, in the options turn 'always show description' on, and watch it fullscreen (bottom right).

The red crates are made of sturdy plastic. When it became clear that custom crates were way too expensive, we settled for industry standard parts in standard sizes, and we adjusted our shelves accordingly. Same for silkscreening the numbers, so we used industrial strength plastic numbers, which turned out very well, in half a year I haven't even seen one beginning of peeling. The lesson learned: don't try to be special, and look outside the box, err, book world.

For staff determining when to add to an existing crate, and when to pick a new, we use these rules-of-a thumb:

The display shows a filling % of each existing crate and the # of items inside. This is enough for staff to figure out if there's still room. If not, new crate. If there is:
in peak periods, when the number of empty crates becomes small: always add.
otherwise, it depends on the day on which the items in the existing crates were added. If the same, we add; if in the past, pick a new.

This way, we have the flexibility to deal with peak periods with slightly more than 1000 boxes; and in less busy times, we can avoid crates with content from multiple days, which makes the workflow for processing of items not picked up more complicated, or forces us to leave the whole box until all items are expired, causing delays for other patrons.

The Red Room: self-service for a closed stack library

2010-02-17T15:34:00.009+01:00

Recently, the Libraries of the University of Amsterdam (UvA, not to be confused with Virginia's UVa - yet another reason to avoid small caps for abbreviations!) and the Amsterdam Polytechnic (HvA) completed the introduction of RFID technology for security and selfservice. It was an interesting project in many of ways. And not just because it finished within budget!

European tendering was mandatory as the costs were well above the 200k€ limit. At first, I balked at this as a necessary bureaucratic evil. My personal opinion on this has completely reversed, however: with an unexpected outsider, Autocheck Systems, winning with a clear margin both in price and quality, this was a textbook case for the merit of the tendering process.

By clearly committing our demands to paper in a neutral way, prejudice is taken out of the equation, or at least reduced to a minor multiplier. The trick is writing good specifications.

Selfservice: for open and closed stacks

Public libraries have used RFID technology for over a decade now. This has created a mature market for open stacks. However, as an academic library, the vast majority of our circulation comes from closed stacks. Here, a different solution is needed, and when we embarked on this journey two years ago, turnkey products that are affordable for the amount of traffic did not exist.

We were hoping for a clever, high-tech solution, not limited to our own imagination. We wanted to tap the creativity of the vendors, bring on fresh ideas! But we most certainly also did not want to write a blank check.

The tender therefore was split up in lots. One for the mature technology, where the functional requirements were formulated clearly, and the scoring algorithm favoured price over extra features (to be precise, in a 7:3 ratio).

For the closed stack solution however, we described our situation, with detailed circulation figures. The nature of the solution - intelligent shelves, lockers, and so on - was left to the vendor. To judge functionality against cost, the vendor would have to supply a detailed description of number of staff still needed to run the closed stacks, and all the actions in their workflow.

Closed stack circulation: the old situation

In the old days, patrons would request materials in the online catalogue. The items would be picked up by the warehouse staff and brought to the backoffice to be checked and processed, and in piles on stacks behind the desk, sorter by patron name, accessible only by staff. A few hours or one day later, depending on the location of the items, the patron would come to the desk, and staff would retreive their material.

For this system, a large number of staff was needed. Not only because the patron was serviced, but also since in the absence of a proper tracking system, the piles had to be checked time and time again, to add new requests for patrons that had already more material waiting, to remove materials that had not been picked up, and to keep everything sorted on alphabet... There was clearly room for improvement. Self-service was only one aspect of the overall workflow.

However, there was one important restriction: privacy. A patron must only be able to borrow items that he or she requested, not items requested by others; and the name of the requesting patron must never be visible to others. In other words, the system must be fully anonymous. We've had run-ins in the past with professors that were spying on each others requested items...

To cut a long story short, we're very pleased with the end result of this project, for both the open and closed stack solutions. In the remainder of this post, I'll concentrate on the Red Room, the closed stack.

The red room

Autocheck Systems supplied the RFID technology and innovative workflow systems. The eye-catching design of the room is by Bureau Ira Koers and Roelof Mulder.

Winner of the Great Indoors 2009 award - Trendhunter: showy red reading rooms - ArchDaily - Abitare (Italy) - ...

Some have called it the most beautiful circulation desk in the world... people love it or hate it, but it leaves hardly anyone untouched. Which is precisely what a library needs in these dark days, isn't it?

Patron's point of view
From the patron point of view, it works like this:

Patron requests an item in the online catalogue;
when the item is ready to be picked up in the Red Room, the patron receives an email with box number(s);
the patron can also check the box numbers where requested items may lie by scanning the library card at an 'infostation' outside the Red Room;
patron picks up the objects from the box, checks them out using selfservice machine inside the room and leaves (and when checking out is forgotten, the alarm at the entrance/exit of the room will go off).

The first weeks, we scheduled staff to stand by, but we stopped this when it became clear that patrons were just 'getting it' very well by themselves. Of course, staff is still available at the information desk nearby, which deals with various oddities that can come up, as well as patrons that need handhelding.

As for the design of the room that leaves nobody untouched, it fulfills its purpose well: it looks quite glamourous, which invites the patrons to treat it with care; and it does not invite to linger, which is good as patrons are supposed to get their items, check them out and then leave the room, either to the many study places in the building or outside.

On the whole, patrons have quickly adopted the new system, and reacted very positively. Requested items can now be picked up during opening hours, seven days a week, every day except Sunday til midnight. The original manned desk was open during office hours, two brief evening windows and Saturday morning.

To our surprise, what our patrons liked even more was the email service announcing the availability of the item. Because this email comes not from the ILS, but from the system that handles the boxes (more about that later), it is sent out the very moment the material is there. In the early days of the system, a glitch caused the mails to be sent out a few minutes early - which caused angry patrons at the information desk requesting why their box was empty...!

There is occasional dismay on the loss of face-to-face interaction. That was to be expected. There are however still plenty of opportunities for human interaction, both on-topic and off-topic. For the former, our information desk is doing brisk business. As for the latter... coffee can be had literally around the corner.

Also for special materials
The Red Room has security gates, forcing a patron to always check their materials with the selfservice machines inside. The security gates of the Red Room check the EAS bit, the regular gates at the main entrance check the AFI. This strategy with two separate zones enables us to also use the Red Room for materials that patrons can only use inside the building, but are not permitted to take elsewhere. For these materials, the selfservice machine leaves the security bit for the outer zone protected.

For this to work however, the ILS needs to send the object handling status to the machine. This is not a part of the SIP2 protocol, as implemented by Aleph! Luckily for us, for materials which may not be taken home, the return date in the SIP2 string is always set to today (it's implemented in the system as 1-day loan). By checking this date, we can work around this limitation.

As any professional knows, RFID cannot provide 100% security. The truly rare material - 100+ years old, collectors items and such - is therefore not handled by the Red Room, but sent to the Rare Books department, where the security measures borders on paranoia, and rightly so.

This also relieves us from nasty dilemmas, such as where on this Blaeu Atlas would I glue this tag... with an estimated lifespan of one or two decades?

Internal workflow
Behind the scenes, the system is, as per Einsteins quip, as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Tagging happens on per-need-basis - with 3+ mln items on closed stacks, it would be impractical and needlessly expensive to tag all items in advance.

Requested items come in from the stacks. If not yet tagged, staff add and program an RFID tag first. In rare occasions, they add a barcode if the item doesn't yet have it. Even though barcodes have been added to all requested materials since 1985, still relatively frequently items pass by that apparently have not been requested in 25 years... another reason to tag only when needed.

After tagging (as well as several other checks), incoming items are sorted by patron name. This is printed on the slip that starts the process inside the warehouse, no interaction with the ILS is needed.

Finally the items are paired with one or more boxes. This is an RFID-supported process that takes place at one of two specialized workstations with a touchscreen and large RFID antenna.
The staff member takes a pile of items and puts it on the RFID antenna of the station. The item ID's are read from the tags. From the item ID's, the user that has made the request is queried from the ILS (unfortunately this is not part of SIP2 or other standards, so a custom webservice needs to be set up. A big thank you to Leiden University for sharing their code!).
The station then first check whether all items on the pile are requested by one patron. Some names are common, and where people work, mistakes inevitably are made. If not, the staff needs to take away items until only items from one patron remain.
Then, the system checks whether this patron already has materials ready in the Red Room. In that case, the staff is presented with a list of boxes. Staff can choose to add items to an existing box, in which case a little slip is printed with book title and ID, and box number to add it to.
Finally, if the item(s) are to be put in a new box, the staff takes an empty box. The boxes are visibly numbered, but also have a tag, so the box only needs to be put on the RFID reader, and the link is made.
The box, filled with the items, is put on a trolley. The request slips are removed - important as the patron's name is printed on them.

After some time, or when it is full, it's driven to the Red Room and the boxes are put in place. On returning, the staff member sends off the patron emails.

In the old days, ~20% of the requested items were never picked up. Retreiving these overdue items was a labourious process that the new system has greatly simplified. At off-peak times, staff print a list of boxes that can be emptied.

Conclusion: happy with lo-tech
In practice, after some initial quirks, the system has been working remarkably well. It's fast, and does not get in the way; it is indeed simple. In the end, lo-tech proved the way to go.

Unfortunately, this summer also saw the migration from our old ILS to Aleph. This makes it hard to calculate the actual staff saving, since the entire workflow has changed in many ways. Current estimates are however that the business case is sound.

Our tender documents are available on request (and have already been used by one other institution), and I'll be happy to answer any further questions.

OR 09: three more neat Fedora implementations

2009-06-15T17:45:00.002+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, Day 4

Three more notable sessions on implementing Fedora. Hopefully, the penultimate post before a final round-up. What a frantic infodump this conference was...

Enhanced Content Models for Fedora - Asger Blekinge-Rasmussen (State and University Library Denmark)

A hardcore technical talk, though impressive in the elegance of the two points shown: bringing the OO model to Fedora object creation, and a DB style ‘view’ for easy creating searching and browsing UIs.

The first is created as an extension of Fedora 3’s standard Content Models, yet backward-compatible, which is a feat. Notable extra’s: declares allowed relations (in OWL lite), schema for xml datastreams. Includes validator service (which is planned as disseminator, too). Open source [sourceforge].

Fedora objects can be manipulated at quite high level using API, but population needs to be done at much lower level. Thus most systems roll their own. Our solution: templates, data objects created as instances of CM’s, not unlike OO programming. Makes default values very easy. No need for handcoded foxml anymore, halleluja! Create, discover, clone templates using template web service.

Then there are repository views, which bundle atomic objects into logical records. Search engine record might be made up of bundle of Fedora objects.
Defined by annotated relations; view angles to create different logical records.
‘view = none’: then omitted from results (useful for small particles you don’t want to have show up in queries, for instance separate slides).

These simple API additions make it easy to create elaborate, simple GUI’s. Which includes the first one I’ve seen that comes close to a workable interface for relationship management - not quite a full drag’n drop, but getting there.

Beyond the Tutorial:Complex Content Models in Fedora 3 - Peter Gorman, Scott Prater (University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center)
[presentation]

Summary: A hands-on walk through of the Wisconsin DIY approach. Also, an excellent example of what a well-done Prezi presentation can look like: literally zooming in on details then zooming out on the global context was really helpful to see the forest for the trees.

The outset: migrating >1million complex, heterogeneous digital objects into Fedora. Use abstract CM’s, atomistic, gracefully absorb new kinds and new combinations of content. Philosophy: 'fit the model to the content, not the content to the model'.
(Not in prodction yet, prototype app; keep eye out for 'Uni Wisconsin digital collections')

Prater starts out with the note that it’s humbling to see that the Hydra and escidoc people have been working on the same problem. However IMHO there’s no reason for embarrassment, as their basic solution is very elegant.

Using MODS for toplevel datastream (similar approach to Hydra). STRUCT datastream: a valid METS document, tying objects to hierarchy. Important point: CM’s don’t define structure, that’s for STRUCT and RELS-EXT.

Every object starts with a FirstClassObject, which points to 0-n child objects of arbitrary types. If zero it’s a citation. To deal with sibling relationships (ie 2 pages in specific order), an umbrella element is put on top with a METS resource map. This allows full METS functionality. Linking using simple STRUCT and RELS-EXT. Advantage over doing everything in RESLEXTS: that doesn’t allow to express sequencing.

Now, to tie this ‘object soup’ together in an app (common problem for lots of objects, to turn the soup into a tree), the solution is simple: always use one monolithic disseminator, viewMETS(). This takes PID for FirstClassObject, returns valid METS doc containing object and all its (grand)children.

This is brilliant: a one-stop API to get the full object tree from a given PID, hiding the complexity of the umbrella object and the METS description involved.

The only part they’re not very satisfactory yet about is how to relate related items between FirstClassObjects and relations between two top-level logical objects (ie journal and article) that are sometimes parent/child, sometimes not.

To which Asger chimed in that his ‘angle view’, demonstrated in the talk before, would be a possible solution for this. I saw them discussing later... I love it when a plan comes together.

When Ruby Met Fedora- Matt Zumwalt (Media Shelf)

A live demonstration of ActiveFedora which made my fingers itch to start coding straight away - until I remembered Ruby’s Unicode issues, rats.

The philosophy behind: use Fedora for long-lived content, but be able to quickly create short-timed services and apps.

ActiveFedora can be used without Rails, or even without Ruby (you can call it from the shell). However, Ruby’s OO model maps very well on Fedora. The key difference with say java or C++: you don’t know what kind of object you’ll get back to a call.

The demo shows the standard rails environment, except the Model directory. There, calls to ActiveRecord are replaced with calls to ActiveFedora. AF exposes Fedora objects with multiple properties. Qualified DC is built-in, but the has_properties function allows for easy extension.

An interesting advantage of this approach is that the methods as used by developers use the same jargon as the metadata users are used to. “they communicate much better when a method’s called dc.subject.”

There’s quite a bit to do ATM. They’ve received funding to hire a student to finally write real documentation. Other extensions: built-in SOLR integration, more generators for standard situations, basic CM integration. Interesting is the approach to integrating MODS: use the existing, mature java libraries, which is easy when using JRuby as interpreter.

OR 09: eScidoc's infrastructure

2009-06-11T17:00:00.002+02:00

eSciDoc Infrastructure: a Fedora-based e-Research Framework - Frank Schwichtenberg, Matthias Razum (FIZ Karlsruhe)

I had not expected this presentation to be as good as it was - it was a real eye-opener for me. It dealt solely and bravely on the underlying structure of eScidoc, not the solutions built on top of them (such as PubMan). So, delving into the technical nitty gritty.

So far, to me eSciDoc has been an interesting promise that seemed to take forever to materialize into non-vaporware. DANS wanted to use it as the basis for the Fedora-based incarnation of their data repository EASY, a plan they had to abandon when their deadline was looming near and the eScidoc API's were still not frozen. Apart from that, the infrastructure seemed also needlessly complex - why was another content model layer necessary on top of Fedora's own?

The idea behind the eScidoc approach is to take a user-centric approach, which in case of the infra, that's the programmer. What would she like to see, instead of Fedora's plain datastreams?
Tentative answer: an application-oriented object view.

eScidoc takes a full atomistic approach to content modelling: an Item is mapped to a fedora object (without assumption about the metadata profile - keeping it flexible). Then, Item has Component. An Item in practice consists of two fedora objects, with a ‘hasComponent’ relation between.

Object can be in arbitrary hierarchies: except the top hierarchies which are reserved for ‘context’, which can be used for institutional hierarchies (a common approach, I can live with that). All relationships are expressed as structmaps.

So far so good, but now the really neat part.

Consequences of the atomistic content model for versioning: a change can occur in any of the underlying fedora objects of a compound object, with consequences for both.
The eScidoc API's store the Object lifecycle automatically. And when one Component changes or is added, the Item object also changes version, but not the other Components.
(the presentations slides are really instructive on this, worth checking out when they're online).

This also delivers truly persistent ID’s (multiple types supported: DOI, handle, etc), separate from fedora’s PID’s which are not really persistent. And every version has one - both of the compound and the separate Item objects. All changes (update/release/submit events etc.) are logged in version log has events, if I remember correctly this log can be used for rollback ie it is a full transaction log.

This is the reason that the security model has to be in the escidoc layer, not fedora's (though the same policies & structures xacml are used). This is eScidoc's answer to the question common to many fedora projects: how to extend fedora's limited security? It might be best to take the whole security layer out of Fedora.

IMHO this is very exciting. This is about the last thing that a project would need to roll yourself - it is incredibly complex to get working correct and durable - and here it is, backed by a body of academic research - it is a German project after all. For me, this puts eScidoc firmly on the shortlist of frameworks.

OR 09: blogosphere links

2009-06-10T17:37:00.003+02:00

Nearly three weeks afterwards, it's time to round up the OR 09 posts... Unfortunately, library life got in the way. Meanwhile, why not read the opinions of these honoured colleagues, that are undoubtly better informed:

loomware.typepad.com/ (Mark Leggott)

Open Repositories 2009 - Peter Sefton's trip report (ptsefton.com)
Open Repositories 2009 – Peter Sefton's further thoughts (caulcairss.wordpress.com)

Leslie Carr (repositoryman.blogspot.com)

John Robertson (Strathclyde)

http://repositoryblog.com/archives/18

http://www.weblogs.uhi.ac.uk/sm00sm/2009/05/

http://jhulibrariestravel.blogspot.com/2009/05/open-repostories-2009.html (Elliot Metsger, Johns Hopkins)

Finally, another bunch'o'links:
http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/open-repositories-2009/

OR09: Four approaches to implementing Fedora

2009-06-05T15:08:00.003+02:00

Open repositories 2009, day three, afternoon.

So far, the conference had not been disappointing, but now it got really interesting. The sessions I followed in the afternoon each highlighted a specific approach of the problem that IMHO has been standing in the way of wider Fedora acceptance: middleware.

What these four have in common, is that they all take leverage an existing OSS product and adapt it to use Fedora as datastore.

1. Facilitating Wiki/Repository Communication with Metadata - Laura M. Bartolo

Summary: interesting approach, a traditional Fez spiced up with Mediawiki. With minimal coding a relative seamless integration.
For this to work, contributors need to know MediaWiki markup, and to really integrate, must learn the fez-specific search markup. Also, I'm not sure how well this can be scaled up to true compound objects, given Fez' limitations.

Notes:
Goal: disseminating of research resources. Specific sites for specific science fields, ie soft matter wiki, materials failure case studies.
MatDL repository: has a repository (Fedora+Fez), want to open up two-way communicating. Example: Soft matter expert community, set up with MediaWiki. "Mediawiki hugely lowers the barrier for participating": familiarity gives low learning curve.

The question: how to integrate the repository with the wiki two-way.

Thinking from user-centric approach. Accommodate user; support complex objects (more useful for research & teaching) thus describe them parts as individual objects.

Components:
- Wiki2Fedora
Batch run. Finds wiki upload file, converts referencing wiki pages to DC metadata for ingest in rep. (wiki has comment, rights, author sections -> very doable) Manual post-processing (Fez Admin review area function)
-Search results plug-in for wiki: display repository results in wiki search. Adds to mediawiki markup, to enable writing standard fez queries in the content.

Sites: Repository - Wiki

2. Fedora and Django for an image repository: a new front-end - Peter Herndon (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center)

Summary: using Django as a CMS, internally developed adapters to Fedora 3.1.

My gut feeling: A specific use case, images only, so rather limited in scope. Despite choosing the 'hook up with mainstream package' strategy, effectively still a NIH-based rolling their own. That makes the issues even more instructive.

Notes:
Adapting a CMS that expects SQL underneath is challenging - the plugin needs to be a full object-to-relational database mapper.
Also, Fedora 'delete' caused 'undesired results', 'inactive' should be used.
Further, some more unexpected oddities: had to write their own LDAP plugin to make it work, django has tagging but again plugin was needed to limit this to controlled vocabularies. Performance was not a problem.
Interesting: repository for images only, so exif and the like can be used - tags added using Adobe Bridge! The tested, successful strategy: make use what is already familiar.
In the Q&A the question came up: why use Fedora in this case anyway? Indeed the only reason would be preservation, otherwise it would have saved a lot of trouble to use Django Blobstore.

The django-fedora plugins are available at bitbucket.org.

3. Islandora: a Drupal/Fedora Repository System - Mark A Leggott (University of PEI)

Summary:
Islandora looks *very* promising. I noted before (UPEI's Drupal VRE strategy) that UPEI is a place to watch - they are making radical choices with impressive outcomes.

Notes:
UPEI's culture is opensource friendly. They use Moodle and Evergreen (apparently, they were the first Evergreen site in production).

Rationale: opensourcing an in-house system reinforces good behaviour: full documentation, quality code.

As noted before, UPEI's repositories are hidden behind VRE (see [link]). VRE's are geared towards the researchers. Example of approach: the first thing people do when they set up a VRE is create a webpage. That's what a project needs, and so it's used as a hook to reel people in, they're up and running within a few hours.

The VRE is Drupal; Fedora is for data assets, metadata, policies.
Base Islandora consists of three plugins: Drupal-Fedora connection plugin, xacml filter, rule engine for searches.

This 'rule engine' is indeed very cool.
In a later private conversation with Mark Leggott, he clarified that Islandora indeed uses an atomistic complex object model for research data; the rule engine declares how these can be searched from within Drupal. Example, a dataset consisting of a number of measuring points, each with a set of instruments, atomistically in Fedora; can be queried as 'all the results from specific measure point', 'all the result from instrument x', 'instrument x in specific period' etc.
We haven't reached Nirvana yet, to make the deconstructing of the data objects possible, they have to adhere to specific format (xml). But it's impressive nevertheless.

Other Drupal plugins add functionality for specific data. Impressive example: Drupal FCK editor used as TEI editor, after editing, automatically ads version to datastream. Very cool and 'Just Works' (cheery tweet).

Marine Natural Products Lab: best example of the setup for VRE which includes extensive repository (searchable within the critter xml).

Previous versions used drupal 5/fedora 2, not maintained; currently drupal 6/fedora 3.1

Q: did you replace the drupal storage layer, or do you sync?
A: sometimes it’s saved in the drupal layer, when it doesn’t need to go into fedora (temporary data, while we build the content model). Drupal filesystem is a potential bottleneck when large datablobs

Q: are you bound to content models?
A: standard fedora cm’s, you can build them yourself or change the delivered one. The models are exposed, you can see how it works. We first installed Fez to see how Fedora worked.

4. Project Hydra: Designing & Building a Reusable Framework for Multipurpose, Multifunction, Multi-institutional Repository-Powered Solutions - Tom Cramer (Stanford University), Richard Green (University of Hull), Bess Sadler (University of Virginia) et al.

Summary:
I'm even more excited about Hydra than about Islandora. Different approach: create "A lego set of services". In other words, a toolkit for the common parts of applications.
It all looks really good. Two gotchas though. Firstly, it is still a work in progress. Can we afford to wait? Secondly, there are issues with the Unicode support of Ruby on Rails.

For more info: D-Lib.

Notes:
Modelled after the current 12+ use cases of repositories in use at partner institutions, both institutional and personal.
It needs generic templates - which sometimes may do the job - otherwise it won’t come off the ground.
Hydra will have common content models and datastream names. But ultimately they want Hydra to be able to cope with almost anything. A MODS datastream will always have to be there, but not necessarily as primary (so can be done via dissemminator).

Four multifunctional sections:

Deposit
manage (edit objects, set access)
search & browse
deliver
plus plumbing: authent, author, complex workflow

Using Rails with ActiveFedora. Turns out Rails lives up to its reputation: they are way ahead of their initial roadmap, now expect full production app by fall.

Specs 3/4 ready, coding 1,5/4.
Demo: http://hydra-dev.stanford.edu/etds

Presentation builds on top of blacklight OPAC. Virgina already has a beta version of their catalogue up using blacklight.

OR09: On the new DuraSpace Foundation, and Fedora in particular

2009-06-01T19:53:00.002+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, day 3, morning: three sessions on Fedora.

The morning started with a joint presentation by Sandy Payette (Fedora Commons) and Michele Kimpton (DSpace Foundation), focussing on strategy and organisation; after caffeine break, Fedora+DSpace tech overview by Brad McLean; finally, developers' open house.

I'll cover it in one blog post (this or09 series is getting a bit long in the tooth, isn't it?). For the actual info on DuraSpace and all, see the DuraSpace website. The tech issues were covered more in depth in further sessions.

The merger, by new almost old news, though the incorporation lies still in the future: Fedora Commons and the Dspace user Group will become DuraSpace. The 'cloud' product, that originally had the same name, is renamed DuraCloud.

Not the easiest of presentations, as there is a good deal of scepticism around the merger, and not just on the twitter #or09 channel. Payette and Kimpton handled it very professionally, dare I say gracefully. Both standing on the floor, in front of the audience, talking in turns (did I imagine it, or did I really hear them taking over a sentence, in Huey & Dewey style?), while an assistant standing behind the laptop was going back and forth through the slides in perfect timing.

All in all, they pulled it off to come across as a seamless team. That bodes well.

Also well was a frankness in the Q&A (as well as later in the developers open house). After noting some difficulties in finding the right strategy for open source development: "we do not aim to mold DSpace's opensource structure to the Fedora core committer, on the contrary".

"We have to ask ourself: are we really community driven in the Fedora project? We've been closed in the past, we're opening up." Fedora has started using a new tracker, actually modelled on DSpace's model; "please use it, our tracker is our new inbox."

On the state of Fedora - many and diverse new users.

Escidoc is now deployable.

WGBH OpenVault - including annotated video

Forced Migration Online

Jewish Women Archive - runs in EC2, first of a new wave of smaller archives now coming online using limited resources.

Notably missing on a slide listing 'major contributors': Mediashelf, Sun, and Microsoft Research: VTLS. Possibly a sponsoring issue? It was more than a bit odd, given their standing in the past.

Q: "How do yo see the future of DSpace vs. fedora - do they compete?"

A: "Fedora’s architecture is great, but we also need ‘service bundles’. CMS style on top for instance. The architecture will stay open for any kind of app on top. DSpace is going the other direction. Opportunity is to make sure we're not doing identical things with different frameworks."

It is *so* easy to read this as 'the products will meet in the middle', but this was carefully avoided. However, in the tech talk later it was mentioned that Fedora-DSpace replication back and forth experiments are actively worked on.

I think I'm not alone in thinking that the products will merge eventually. It will take some time, but they will.

Q: (cites another software company merger, IIRC Oracle and Peoplesoft) – merger brings great unrest in communities, which one is going to die? Are F&D moving together? Technical and cultural changes for both communities? etc.

A: Payette: any kind of software eventually becomes obsolete. We are determined not to let that happen, and for that it needs to be modular and organic. Side by side, cause they both do things well. When overlap starts to happen, that may change, but by the module.

Peter Sefton chimed in: very positive. Right decision at the right time. Focus on cloud computing is essential, feels that this is what we’re moving towards, and our current monolithic repositories need to adapt to that.

Some DSpace 1.x upcoming features: statistics, embargo, batch editing. I don't know that much about DSpace, and it shows: I was surprised that these weren't covered yet. Esp. batch editing and embargo, pretty basic features. I know too little of DSpace to judge the announced 2.0 features, apart from the DuraCloud integration using Akubra.

Fedora 3.2 highlights:

SWORD API 1.3. Of course. Nice though
new web admin client. Not all of the features implemented, so the java client hasn't been deprecated - it will in future. This is a big deal, as the client is also useful for metadata editing staff.
akubra: store files by ID, pluggable, stackable, multiplexing (ie on multiple storage environments that to the API look as one big one). Experimental, meaning included but not turned on by default.

Finally, the Fedora developer open house was like getting the pulse of the developer community. Summary: there are pains, communication has been problematic, with a gap between the committers and the community. My impression is that it is finally being talked about, and the core developers in the panel admitting that a change is needed. A constructive and open approach.

OR09: Repository workflows: LoC's KISS approach to workflow

2009-05-30T16:24:00.003+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, day 2, session 6b.

Transfer and Inventory Components of Developing Repository Services

Leslie Johnston (Library of Congress)

My summary:

A practical approach to dealing with data from varying sources, keep it as simple as possible, but not simpler.

The ingest tools look very useful for any type of digitization project, especially when working with an externel party (such as a specialized scanning company).

The inventory tool may be even more useful, as lifecycle events are generally not well covered by traditional systems, be it CMS or ILS.

Background

LoC acts as durable storage deposit target for widely varying projects and institutions. Data transfers for archiving range between an usb stick in the mail to 2Tb transferred straight over the network. The answer to dealing with this: simple protocols, developed together with uc digilib (see also John Kunze).

Combined, this is not yet full a repository, but it covers many aspects of ingest and archive functionality. Rest will come. Aim: provide persistent access at file level.

Simple file format: BagIt

Submitter is asked to describe files it in BagIt format.

BagIt is a standard for packaging files; METS files will fit in there, too. However, BagIt wascreated because we needed something much, much, much simpler. It’s not as detailed; description is a manifest, it may omit relationships, individual descriptions, etc. It is very lightweight (actually too light: we’ve started creating further profiles for certain types of content).

LoC will support Bagit similarly and simultaneously to MODS & METS.

Simple tools

Simple tools for ingest:

- parallel receiver (can handle network transactions over rsync, ftp, http, https)

- validator (checks file format)

- verifyit (checksums files)

These tools are supplied as java lib, java desktop application, and LocDrop webapp (prototype for SWORD ingest).

Integration between transfer and inventory is very important: trying to retrieve the correct information later is very hard.

After receiving, inventory tool records lifecycle events.

Why a standardized tool: 80% of workflow overlap between projects.

All tools availble open source [sourceforge]. What's currently missing will be added soon.

OR09: Repository workflows: ICE-TheOREM, semantic infra for theses

2009-05-30T15:54:00.003+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, day 2, session 6b.

ICE-TheOREM - End to End Semantically Aware eResearch Infrastructure for Theses

Jim Downing (University of Cambridge), Peter Sefton (University of Southern Queensland)

Summary: great concept, convincing demonstration. Excellent stuff.

Part if ICE project, a JISC funded experiment with ORE.

[paper] (seems stuck behind login?)

Importance of ORE: “ORE is a really important protocol – it has been missing for the web for most of its life so far.” (DH: Amen!)

Motivations for TheOREM: check ORE – is it applicable and useful? What are different ways of using? How do SWORD and ORE combine?

Pracitally: improving theses visibility, embargoes as enabler.

Interesting: in the whole repository system, the management of embargoes is separated from the repository by design. A special system serves resourcemaps for the unembargoed, IR polls these regularly. Interesting: this reflects the real-world political issues, and makes it easier to bring quite radical changes.

Demonstrator (with the Fascinator) with one thesis, with reference to data object: molecule description in chemical markup language (actual data).

Simple authoring environment in openoffice Writer (Word is also supported), stylesheet + convention based approach. When uploaded, the doc is taken apart to atomistic xml objects in Fedora. The chemical element is a separate object with relation to the doc, versioning etc.

Embargo metadata is written as text in the doc (on title page; date noted using convention,KISS approach), and a style (p-meta-date-embargo) is applied. The thesis is again ingested - and voila, the part of the thesis with embargo is now hidden.

This simple system also allows dialogue between student and tutor - remarks on the text - to be embedded in the document itself (and hidden to the outside by default). It looks deceivingly like Words's own comments, which I imagine will ease the uptake.

Sidenote: policy in this project is that only submitter can ever change embargo data. So it is recommended to use openID rather than institutional logins, as PhD graduates tend to move on, and then nobody can change it anymore.

Q (from Les Carr): supervisors won’t like to have their interaction with students complicated by tech. What is their benefit?

A: automatic backing up is a big benefit, also of the workflow (ie. the comments in the document text). We *know* students appreciate it. Supers may not like it but everyone else will, and then they’ll have to.

(note DH: this is of course in the sciences, it will be an interesting challange to get the humanities to adhere to stylesheet and microformatting conventions)

Q: can this workflow also generate the ‘authentic and blessed copy’ of the final thesis?

A: Not in project scope, we still produce the pdf for that. In theory this might be a more authentic copy, but they might scream at the sight of this tech.

OR09: Social marketing and success factors of IR’s.

2009-05-30T15:21:00.004+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, day 2, session 5b.

Social marketing and success factors of IR’s: two thorough but not very exciting sessions. Though the lack of excitement is maybe also because the message is quite sobering: we already know what needs to be done, but it is very hard to change the (institutional) processes involved.

Social marketing approach to IR, a Canadian perspective.

(where social marketing doesn’t stand for web2.0 goodness, but for marketing with the aim of changing social behaviour, using the tools of commercial marketing).

Generally, face to face contact works best - on faculty scale, or in smaller institution like UPEI.

One observation that stuck with me is that the mere word repository is passive, where we want to emphasize exposure. This is precisely our problem as a whole in moving the repository into an active part at the center of the academic research workflow, instead of a passive end point.

Finaly, the list of good examples started out with Cream of science! We tend to take it for granted here in the Netherlands, and focus on where we're stuck; it’s good to be reminded how well that has worked and still does.

Secrets of succes - identifying success factors in IR's.

Interim news from uMich Miracle project (Making Institutional Repositories A Collaborative Learning Environment).

Not very exciting yet, might change when they’ve accumulated more data (it’s a work in progress, five case studies of larger US institutions, widely varying in policy, age, technology).

Focus on “outcome instead of output”.

Focus on external measurements of success, instead of internal (ie number of objects etc). Harder to enumerate, less easy, but gets more honest results.

OR09: Keynote by John Wilbanks

2009-05-27T17:23:00.003+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, day 1, keynote.

Locks and Gears: Digital Repositories and the Digital Commons - John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science, Creative Commons

Great presentation - in content as well in format. Worth looking at the slides [slideshare - of a similar presentation two weeks earlier]. [Which was good, because it was awkwardly scheduled at the end of the afternoon, that's great with a fresh jetlag, straight after the previous panel session without as much as a toilet break.]

The unfortunately familiar story of journals on the internet, scholars' rights eroding, which causes interlocking problems that prevent the network effect.

Choice quotes:
“20 years ago, we would have rather believed there be a worldwide web of free research knowledge, than Wikipedia.”
"The great irony is that the web was designed for scientific data, and now it works really well for porn and shoes."

The CC licenses are a way of making it happen with journals. However, for data even CC-BY is making it hard to do useful integration of different datasets. Survey of 1000 bio databases: >250 different licenses! Opposite law of open source software: the most conservative license wins.

Example of what can happen if data is set free: Proteomecommons.org: bittorent for genomes. Thanks to CC Zero.

What can we do?
Solve locally, share globally.
Use standards. And don’t fork them.
Lead by example.

Q: opinion on wolfram alfa? Or Google Squared?
A: pretty cool, doubts about scaling. It may be this or something else, rather open source than ‘magic technology’. But it’s a sign that the web is about to crack.
“The only thing that’s proven to scale is distributed networks.”

(my comment - with an estimated 500.000 servers, that is precisely what Google is...)

OR09: Panel session - Insights from Leaders of Open Source Repository Organizations

2009-05-27T16:42:00.003+02:00

Open repositories 2009, day 1, session 4.

A panel with the big three open source players (Dspace’s Michelle Kimpton and Fedora Commons’ Sandy Payette, freshly merged into Duraspace, ePrints’ Les Carr) and Lee Dirks from Microsoft. Zentity (no, not Zentity - 1.0 was officially announced at this conference) brings up lots of good questions. Unfortunately it didn’t get to an interesting exchange of ideas.

I’ll concentrate on Microsoft, as they were the elephant in the room. Warning: opinions ahead.

Microsoft is walking a thin line, their stance has been very defensive. Dirks started out quipping that “We wanted to announce Microsoft merging with ePrints, we got together yesterday, but we couldn’t agree on who was going to take over who.”

He went on stressing that this is Microsoft Research and they're not required to make a profit. Putting on a philanthropist guise, he went on that their goal is to offer an open source repository solution to organizations that already have campus licenses. “How can we help you use software that you already paid for but maybe don’t use?”. They claim they don't want to pull people away from open source solutions.

The most interesting parts were what he was *not* saying. Which open source does MS not want to pull us away from - Java? MySQL? Eclipse? Or did he only mean open source repository packages?
Yeah right… getting visual studio, IIS, SQL server and the most dangerous of all, Sharepoint a foot in the door.

An audience question that nailed the central issue: "The question will be lock-in. commitment in other parts of the lifecycle are therefore more important. Zentity hooks you up everywhere in the MS stack."
Dirks responded with "Everything we’ve done, is built on open API’s, be it Sharepoint or Office or whatever. You could reconstruct it all yourself."

Well with all respect to the Mono and Wine efforts, I wouldn't call Sharepoint and Office API's you could easily replace. The data will still be in a black box. Especially if you want to make any use of the collaboration facilities. Having open API's on the outside is fine and dandy, but one thing we're learned so far with repositories is that it is hard to create an exchange (metadata)format that is neither too limited nor so complicated it hinders adoption.

On an audience question his stance on data preservation, Dirks initially replied that ODF would solve this, including provenance metadata. No mention of the controversy around this file format - what use is an xml format that cannot be understood? - or on filetypes outside the Office Universe.

When this debate stranded, Sandy Payette turned the mood around by mentioning that MS has contributed much to interoperability issues. It is indeed good to keep in mind that MS is not just big and bad - they aren't. A company that employs Accordionguy can't be all that bad. The trouble is, you have to stay aware and awake, for they aren't all that good, either. Imagine an Office-style lock-in for collaboratories.

OR09: NSF Datanet-curating scientific data

2009-05-26T14:29:00.003+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, Day 1, session 3. NSF Datanet-curating scientif data, John Kunze and Sayeed Choudhury.

The first non-split plenary (why a large part of the first two days consisted of 'split plenaries' baffled me, and I was not the only one).

Two speakers, two approaches. First John Kunze from UCDL, focussing in the microlevel with a strategy of keeping it simple. "Imagining the non-repository", "avoid the deadly embrace" of tight standards: decouple by design, lower the barrier of entry.

One of the ways to accomplish this is by staying lo-tech: instead of fullblown database systems, use a plain file system and naming conventions: pairtree. I really like this approach. I've worked in large digitization projects with third parties delivering content on harddisks. They bulk at databases and complicated metadata schemes, but this might just be doable for them. Good stuff.

CDL has a whole set of curation microsystems, as they call it. I'm going to keep an eye out for this.

The second talk, by Sayeed Choudhury (Johns Hopkins), focussed on the macro level of data conservancy. This was more abstract, and he started out with the admission that "we don’t have the answers, there are unsolved unknowns - otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten that NSF grant".

Interesting: one of the partner institutions (not funded by NSF) is Zoom Intelligence – a venture capital firm, interested in creating software services on research data. First VS's bought into ILS, now they pop up here... we must be doing something right!

Otherwise, the talk was mostly abstract and longer term strategy.

OR09: Institutional Repositories: Contributing to Institutional Knowledge Management and the Global Research Commons

2009-05-25T17:47:00.004+02:00

Day 1, session 2b.

Institutional Repositories: Contributing to Institutional Knowledge Management and the Global Research Commons - Wendy White (University of Southampton)

Insightful, passionate kick-ass presentation, with some excellent diagrams in the slides (alas I found no link yet), especially one that puts the repository in the middle of the scientific workflow. The message was clear: tough times ahead for repositories – we have to be an active part of the flow, otherwise we may not survive.

Current improvements (see slides: linking into HR instead of LDAP to follow history of deployment, lightbox for presentation of nontext material) are strategy-driven, which is a step forward from tech-driven, but still piecemeal.

Predicts grants for large scale collaboration processes could be tipping point for changing lone researcher paradigm.

(in my opinion, this may well be true for some fields, even in the humanities, but not for all. Interesting that for instance The Fascinator Desktop aim to serve those ‘loners’).

Stress that Open access is not just idealism, it can also benefit in highly competitive fields – cites a research group that got a contract because the company contacted them after they could see what their researchers where doing.

“build on success stories: symbols and mythology”.
“Repository managers have fingers in lots of pies, we are in a very good position to take on the key bridging role.”
It will however require a culture change, also in the management sphere. In the Q&A she noted that Southhampton is lucky to have been through that process already.

All in all, a good strategic longer term overview, and quite urgent.

OR09: PEI's Drupal strategy for VRE and repositories

2009-05-24T18:57:00.004+02:00

OR09, day 1, session 2a. Research 2.0: Evolving Support for the Research Landscape by Mark Leggott (University of PEI) - [slides here] - [blog here]

Small province in Canada, middle of nowhere, pop 140k, only uni on the island. UPEI is doing very some good stuff, made some radical choices. They fundamentally transformed the library from traditional staff to techies. Number of staff didn’t change (25), but the number of techs increased from 1 to 5, plus a pool of freelancers.

VRE's using Drupal

Strong push for VRE’s, using Drupal as platform. Low entry barrier: any researcher can request one! All customisations are non-specific as a rule, so all users benefit in the end. If researcher brings additional funding, contract devs are hired to speed up the process.

Some clients have developed rich Drupal plugins themselves (depends on a willing postgrad :-)

Currently 50+ VRE’s. Example of a globe-spanning VRE: Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing

But the same environment is also used for local history projects with social elements (“tag this image”).

Why going opensource? Improves code and documentation quality by emberrassment factor: “Going opensource is like running through the hotel at night naked – you want to be at least presentable”.

Repository: Drupal+Fedora=Islandora

PEI developed Islandora as frontend for Fedora repository. However, from the users POV it is completely hidden: they log in to the VRE, this silently handles depositing in the rep.

Both Drupal and Fedora are ‘strong systems’ with a lot of capabilities. However by definition all data and metadata go in Fedora, to separate data from application layer and make migration possible. This needs to be strongly enforced as some things are easier in Drupal.

Very neat integration betwee data objects in repository and VRE: Researchers can search specifically within the objects, as in “search for data sets in which field X has value between 7 and 8”. Done by mapping the data to an xml format, then mapping xml fields to search params. For fields where xml data formats are available and commonly used this is a real boon (example of marine biology).

Great stuff altogether. The small size may give them an advantage, they operate like a startup, listen to their users, pool resources effectively and are not afraid to make radical choices.

BTW fifteen minutes in the talk I connected the acronym PEI with the name Prince Edward Island. PEI must be so famous in the repository world that it either needn't be explained at all, or that it was mentioned so briefly that it slipped me by...

OR09: Purdue's investigation on Research Data Repositories

2009-05-24T18:48:00.005+02:00

OR09 day 1, session 2a: Michael Witt (Purdue University) "Eliciting Faculty Requirements for Research Data Repositories

Preliminary results of investigation in what researchers want regarding data (repositories). Some good stuff. Hope the slides will be published soon - or the report for that matter.

See Seans weblog for the ten primary questions, good for self-evalution also. Mark Leggott then quickly added an additional 11th question to his slideshow - how much is in your wallet...

Method: interviews and followup survey with twenty scientists, transcribed (using Nvivo). “It was like drinking from a firehose.” For each, a “data curation profile” was created, with example data & description. Will beinteresting when it comes out.

OR09: on subject based repositories

2009-05-24T18:00:00.008+02:00

Open Repositories 2009, day one, session 1b.

Phew! OR09 is over, and my jetlag almost. An intense conference that was certainly worth it, the content was generally interesting and well-presented. I'll be posting my conference notes here the coming few days.

First session on Monday morning were two talks on two subject based repositories. The planned third one, on a Japanese one, was cancelled - unfortunately as I know very little of what’s happening there regarding OA.

First came Julie Ann Kelly (University of Minnesota) on AgEcon, a repository for Agricultural Economics, a field with a strong working paper tradition. It was set up in the gopher days (not so surprising, as the critter originated in Minnesota).

Interesting was the reason: in this fields, working papers are citable, but the reference format was a mess.

Even more interesting: because of this, it also became the de facto place for depositing appendices to articles - datasets! The repository accepts them and they have the same citing format. There is a lesson here... solve a real problem, and content will come.

Usage statistics: only 53% of downloads comes from people, 43.6% is googlebot (rest other spiders). 66% of visitors come through google straight to results, not through the frontend anymore. Then 19% are some other search engines: leaves 14% coming through front.

Further notes:

Why is life easier in a subject repository?

Focussed topic makes metadata easier, common vocabularies exists etc.
Recruitment (of other institutions) is easier (specialists in one profession tend to meet frequently, recruiting can piggyback on conferences etc).

And why is it harder?

organising the community is hard work - 170 institutions with each between 1 and 300 submitters creates a lot of traffic on quality issues. They frequently hire studens for the correcting.

Minnesota is consolidating its repositories from 5-6 different systems to Islandora. AgEcon will be one of them.

They want to use this Drupal based system also to add social networking, akin to Ethicshare. Ethicshare is interesting: a social citation manager (a la Citeulike/Bibsonomy) plus repository plus social network plus calendar and then some more, for a specific field of study, in this case ethic research. Commoditisation coming?

The second subject repository was on Economists Online, presented by Vanessa Proudman of Tilburg University. Interesting to see this is in many ways the opposite approach. EO is a big European project that works top-down, tries to get the big players aboard first as incentive for the others, and emphasizes quality above all. Whereas AE was a grassroots bottom-up model, that empowered small institutions.

It's a work in progress, only mockups shown. These look slick, with a well thought-out UI. Interesting: with every object in the result list, statistics will be shown inline (ajax), and can be downloaded in multiple formats.

Small pilot with 10 datasets per participating institution, DDI format, Dataverse as preferred solution. Provenance of datasets is very complicated: there are many contributors to the data life cycle, dataset owners, sources, providers, all must be accredited.

Like AE, EO stresses that subject-based repositories have different characteristics. They will organize a dedicated conference on subject repositories in january 2010 in London, as they note that the subject rarely comes up at general repository conferences.

Interest in attending: mail subjectrep_parts@lists.uvt.nl

RFID for libraries: HF or UHF? (2)

2008-10-03T14:43:00.004+02:00

Finally! With the European tender wrapped up, Autocheck Systems chosen as our partner, our RFID project is finally on its way. Now I can share a little more on the technology choice, following up on a post from, *cough*, one year ago.

When we started preparing, it looked like UHF had great potential to overcome some of the shortcomings of HF. To check whether this would work in practice, we organized a test in our stacks with UHF gear together with one of the major vendors. The test looked specifically at speed and reliability of inventory with a hand-held device. Unfortunately, the test resulted in a muddled answer: UHF showed great potential indeed, but needed more finetuning to get consistent results. Meanwhile, other HF vendors were showing that they were still able to tweak their systems further to reach speeds that, although not as high as UHF's, were still closing the gap to the point where reading with a hand-held was becoming notably faster than checking by eye.

Because of this, we decided not to specify HF or UHF in the tender. Instead, we asked for vendors to specify the performance of their system in terms of speed and accuracy for three scenarios. The lower the speed and the higher the accuracy, the more points could be earned, calculated on a logarithmic scale, starting from zero at 98% accuracy and a different number of seconds for each scenario, via hundreds or so for expected HF speeds to thousands for UHF.

To prevent a vendor bluffing, these numbers would need to be proven in a trial setup, failing which would lead to automatic exclusion. You could say that we tested the trust the vendors had in their systems.

Now I obviously can't give out details of the bids, but here's the general outcome. UHF vendors scored well, but at a relatively high price. And some - though not all! - HF vendors wrote in with a performance higher than expected for HF, though still below the UHF figures. The clear winner, Autocheck, was one of these high-performing HF vendors. They scored best on the combination of high HF performance with a very decent pricetag (needless to say, they were able to prove their performance figures).

So, an interesting outcome, not quite what we expected. A side effect is that it changed my opinion on the European tendering process. Yes, it is tedious, bureaucratic and can lead to unexpected results. But by tendering for functional requirements, rather than for a specific technology, we actually ended up with a good deal. That it was not what we expected is all the better. The trick is to properly investigate what you want and specify that, rather than how you want it done.

Selfportrait with legal document

2008-09-23T10:40:00.002+02:00

Selfportrait with wings / Selfportrait with legal document, originally uploaded by driek.

Finally, we're almost there with our BDP. I hope that I can 'zip up the kimono' (*) on our RFID plans (and imminent execution) in just a few more days...

(*) Steve Jobs' words on being allowed to visit Xerox PARC.

We have a tender!

2008-02-21T15:50:00.004+01:00

Quite a long time ago I started what I hoped would be a series on UHF vs HF RFID. That proved most optimistic, and the real world came in the way.

However, after a *lot* of work the past weeks and months, which I could not write about - oh the horror - I can safely announce that we have sent our Tender Request off to TED (Tenders European Daily). This is the followup to an earlier pre-announcement we made on TED - which is handy, because having pre-announced, we can shave off some time off the procedure that follows. Unfortunately, not much time to write about it now - but if you're interested, keep an eye on TED for the publication.

And what came of the HF vs UHF question? In the end, we decided to specify on functionality rather than choosing ourselves, leaving it to the companies to propose the best system for our wishes. In our quality demands, we do value speed and reliability with a formula which multiplies the squared values for these. This makes for an interesting challenge, we hope - a functioning UHF system that lives up to the expectations could earn a *lot* of points, but it would need to be both fast and reliable for that. And the values need to be proven in a proof of concept.

More later... interesting times!

Chişinău (Moldova) - National Library

2008-01-10T17:36:00.001+01:00

Chişinău (Moldova) - National Library, originally uploaded by Danielzolli.

With all the innovation we're working on, it's hard to remember that the library world has many facets. This is a blast from the past. Not just the picture; check out the description of the bureaucracy around obtaining a book in the flickr page. Library 1.0, it seems so long ago.

A virtual library in Urbino, Italy

2008-01-06T21:07:00.000+01:00

I've been having some wonderful time off in Italy with my wife (flickr set) and, as a sign that I am to return to my working life, the television news today made a big deal of a new Virtual Library in Urbino. I've looked for a web site but found none, the library may very well have one but my italian is still pretty rudimentary. But luckily, this blog posting has some pictures.

There was a big event in the village, the ciaspolada, and the family made sure to not miss a single bit of coverage, hence I saw an unusual amount of tv news (of dubious quality) today. They all made a big deal of the interface, which is indeed interesting: fully gesture-based. You either sit or stand in front of a wall, on which an image of an ancient library (leather bound volumes) is projected, and by gesturing wildly with your arms, you can take a book from a shelf, and the flip through it. I didn't see any library staff interviewed, apart from the interaction designer, whose name I sadly can't recall now.

All old manuscripts of course, at least for the demo. As a library professional I would be interested in the approach to the digitization to these works, as from this coverage I have the impression that they were scanned cover to cover. We know that costs an arm and a leg, so which selection criteria were applied? Also, no mention of how to find a book in this library apart from the pretty but pretty useless picture of the bookshelves, or the amount of calories browsing takes with the many wide arm movements.

But still, way to go, Urbino! And if someone could point me to a website I'd be most grateful.

Arrivederci,
Driek

Yet another danger of the current state of copyright...

2007-11-06T10:11:00.000+01:00

Techcrunch reports on the launch of Attributor, a startup company that monitors copyright infringement on the web. The timing is interesting: just now there is a mild uproar in some blog circles in the Netherlands about Cozzmozz. Where Attributor only monitors, and leaves it to the copyrightholders to decide whether and which action to take, this company takes it a significant step further: they also takes legal action on behalf of the authors (in exchange for a nice cut of course).

This blog quoted a short article in full. Dutch copyright law allows for a kind of 'fair use', which is vaguely formulated though, making this a borderline case. The full article was quoted, a no-no, but it was so short it would have been difficult to leave out something in the context of the argument made against the stance of the interview. This took place a while ago. Then out of the blue, several days ago Cozzmozz threatened to sue but offered a deal, first 240 then 160 euro instead of 600, which the blogger in case chose to pay. Though offers of support were flooding in, as an ME patient, her energy is limited and she decided that she could not afford a long story.

The real danger here is that when copyright holders transfer their rights to outifits, which exploit them in exchange for a cut, the grey area between the legal and the moral right disappears. Would the freelance journalist who wrote the article have chosen to sue this blogger herself?

What's legally right may not differ from what's morally right. Yet another reason to clear up copyright laws.

(edited 6/12, 20.20 - made the difference between attributor and cozzmozz clearer).

RFID for libraries: HF or UHF? (1)

2007-10-15T14:11:00.001+02:00

Using RFID tags in libraries has become common nowadays, at least for public libraries. The high circulation rates make the math simple: introducing self-service for patrons increases the efficiency significantly enough to pay back.

For research libraries with a much lower circulation rate, this advantage is not that great, and as a result, RFID adoption is trailing. But, as a famous dutch philosopher would say, every disadvantage has its advantage (and vice versa...).

HF: the de facto standard

There are several types of RFID, each operating in a different wave spectrum. The most important ones are HF and UHF, operating respectively the High and the Ultra High Frequency bands. Though the basic technique is the same, the different wavelengths make quite a difference in the details.

The de facto standard for library RFID use is to use HF-based techniques. This can be considered proven tech these days, and there is a healthy marketplace with numerous vendors offering systems. This is historical: when libraries started adopting RFID, HF was the more mature technology, and it was foreseen that its shortcomings for inventory would be solved in the future. This, however, has not happened. HF RFID works well for patron self-service, but is still not reliable enough for inventory.

For research libraries, the advantage of introducing RFID are much less in the area of self-service, and much more in warehousing. Research libraries keep their books for a much longer time, if not indefinitely, and have large closed stack warehouses. This is where it gets interesting.

UHF vs HF

In recent years, UHF technology has also matured, and has become the RFID type of choice for industries where tracking and tracing is the most important goal. All the big name-projects use UHF: Wal-Mart, Metro, Marks & Spencers', as well as numerous other ones. UHF can scan hundreds of objects per second, and more importantly, it can do it reliably. And here we come to the big difference: the way read failures are handled. With HF, failures are caused by tags too close to each other, parallel, to the shelf or a wall. These tags are effectively skipped.

UHF also has its share errors. However, the tags are much less prone to distortion caused by being placed too close together; and also the reading speed makes the scanner effectively retry reading a difficult tags numerous times. The main reading errors of UHF are caused by field distortion. Certain types of materials and shapes can work as a conduit, effectively extending the field in which the reader operates in a seemingly random direction. When that happens, the reader will also pick up tags from a number of meters away, rather than just the ones close by.

This causes its share of problems - but they are of a different category. The importance is that where HF fails with silent reading errors, UHF fails by reading too many. Reading tags that turn out to be several shelves away are a problem when looking for a specific misplaced book. However, silent errors are deadly when taking inventory. When you have too many results, you can try to filter the unwanted ones out; when you have too few, there's nothing you can do.

UHF has the promise to deliver. Yet HF is the proven technology. What to do?

To be continued...

Social Academic referencing: a trial

2007-05-31T15:24:00.000+02:00

At the Library of the University of Amsterdam, we've done a small trial to investigate the merits of using a 'social referencing' service. In the trial, scientists from a specific research group used such a service for several months. With a panel discussion before and after, and logs during, we hoped to get some measurable results on the impact on their work of this. Not all went as we hoped, but the resulting report (url below) offers some useful insight in what this group of scientists found useful.

I'll highlight two points that may be of wider interest. First of all, our test group felt strongly about privacy. They liked to not just add cites to a system, and tag, rate or even comment them heavily for themselves. For sharing however, it was felt essential to have control over who could see what. Rating an article negatively could be helpful for direct peers, but who knows whether the author might decide over a grant in future? The participants wanted a clear, fine-grained control. Sometimes it would be fine to share the citation, but to limit the rating or tags to a certain group; some comments are meant private, some are for the whole world; and so on. Because of this, they voted to use BibSonomy at the start of the trial.

However, it turns out that ease of use is even more important than features, and the group considered the system not easy enough. To save the project, we switched to Citeulike, and extended the use period.

I'm curious what others think of this demand for detailed control over privacy-settings. In researching next generation research collaboratories, again I found scientists consider it paramount to be able to set the privacy level for each item themselves. Not through a helpdesk, ticketqueue and a sysadmin - themselves. The two main contenders to build such systems on top of, Sakai and Sharepoint, provide such a detailed rights-structure out of the box. So it's not pie-in-the-sky thinking: it is already out there.

The project page

Download report (pdf)

BTW: yes, we're working on a proper publication.

Linking social networks

2007-05-31T14:58:00.000+02:00

Thinking further about social networks and the need to link them, I rememberd the classic post from Jason Kottke: Being your friend is hard. This was written in the heyday of the first generation of general social networking sites, before a clear winner had arrived - at least for specific areas, such as geographic (bebo for the UK, hyves in .nl), thematic (facebook) or generational (myspace).

The fact that these 'winners' have indeed arrived is an indication that users flock to communities that are large enough - with large enough being pretty damn big. Too big for individual libraries, that's for sure.

Maybe Aquabrowsers' interoperability might be good enough so that it becomes a de facto standard, like RSS became. For this to work, they need to solve the problem of unique identifiers for any item in the system, whether ILS item, internal digital asset or digital from an external source. Ideally, this would be the first step towards a generic DOI for objects.

Of course, let's hope it won't be like the tangled mess that RSS became. As the library community, we'd better keep an eye out! Interesting times, interesting times.

Notes on the Stroomt Library 2.0 workshop

2007-05-28T21:46:00.000+02:00

Stroomt, a company specializing in 'information optimizing', organised a Library 2.0 Theme day (though actually an afternoon) this Friday.

A small impression first. I only took my camera out at the guided tour of the museum where the afternoon was held, at which the attendees expressed polite interest - until the tour finished at the old library room of the observatory, and the ooh-ing and aah!-ing commenced...

On to business. A theme of the talks, and the discussion, was how to make social networks work. Folksonomies depend heavily on scale: the more participants a network has, the better. But in reality, networks are isolar, divided, split... For example, you could leave a comment on this picture both here, on the blog, or on its flickr page. Two different networks that do not connect.

Kudos for Moqub for full transcripts. These are a few remarks that piqued my interest.

Liesbeth Mantel (Moqub):

Observation: 75% of internet users does not know the term web 2.0 - but uses it all the time (leaving comments, using ratings and 'trust' on eBay, etc.)

Example of a (public) library that has embraced content: Gail Library

I somehow missed Librarything for libraries - that's cool! Even though it still is an insolar community (only libraries), it packs more users than a single library has patrons.

Menno Rasch (UU):

As port of portal strategy, they actually have a working portlet for the catalogue, showing books ready to be picked up, and books already borrowed with a renew link! It should be nothing special but no way we could build this with our ILS... (yes, our vendor is a four-letter word). Good for them that they chose Aleph.

And yes, they get it: the portlet can be integrated in other portals, *outside* the uni's domain, such as netvibes! Way to go.

But alas, they don't get it as far as user-contributed content for Omega is concerned - they're very hesitant in adding that. Pity. They doubt if the 25k users would be enough to make it useful - and 'long tail' does not count as such.

Alexander Blanc (SURFnet):

Rather specialised talk on the Surfnet video portal and their plans for that. Much still unclear. Much relies on material from the (rather expensive) academia license. They would like to become a youtube, but it'll be an organisational challange as the whole model right now is based on institutional use. Also no plans for supporting CC-licensing yet, though he's not ruling it out either.

Taco Ekkel (Aquabrowser):

Aquabrowser has 250 library installations worldwide. Their idea: add usercontributed metadata to these and link them. That's smart. They promise to do it using open protocols for exchange of such data, that alas have still to be developed. There'll be an open API though. If that works out, it'd be terrific.

Interesting approach: no special tools for librarians - they can make lists, rate items and all that jazz, but librarians' accounts are in principle no different from patrons'. Wonder if that flies with the professionals, might be a hard sell to let go of the specialness. Hope it works - I'm sure the pros will still come floating on top, simply by the quantity and quality of their contributions, but that way the 'trust' those accounts build up will be based on actual accomplishments.

The charts of Aquabrowsers' internals look a lot like Primo's. They hint at full support for integrating federated search sources. Unfortunately, nothing's even planned for bringing all the Library2.0-goodies that the internal sources get to these. Technically I understand, but how am I going to explain this to the average researcher? And why?

Finally...

Interesting day. Good to see that Library2.0 is very much alive in the dutch library community. Also good to see that this is only the beginning. We've got a long road ahead - thinking on linking social networks together is only just starting out, and collaboratories and new forms of use and re-use of information objects weren't even mentioned in the discussions. For which their was, BTW, not enough time - the biggest drawback of this afternoon.

Famous last words

impromptu business cards - another use for MOO cards!

A workshop on library 2.0: the next step

2007-03-09T16:23:00.000+01:00

In december, Marco Streefkerk and yours truly organised a workshop on Library 2.0. What started as a small meeting, then grew into quite a gathering, with participants from three Dutch universities, two overview lectures on the challenges that we've come to call Library 2.0, and three possible scenario's to get there.

Certainly an interesting afternoon, with much food for thought. Therefore I'm glad that most presentations are now available online:

http://www.uba.uva.nl/library-2.0-workshop

Kottke on the popularity of Flickr vs. Fotolog

2007-02-14T16:04:00.000+01:00

Jason Kottke, always one to watch, wrote an insightful post on the relativity of the popularity of one of web2.0's poster children, flickr.

The second point he makes has something in store for research librarians:

2. Flickr is more editorially controlled than Fotolog. The folks who run Flickr subtly and indirectly discourage poor quality photo contributions. Yes, upload your photos, but make them good. And the community reinforces that constraint to the point where it might seem restricting to some. Fotolog doesn't celebrate excellence like that...it's more about the social aspect than the photos.

In other words, not all communities are equal. As academic libraries, we cannot and should not aim to build communities of maximum size. This is where our long tradition of quality over quantity comes in. If that means, for example citeulike won't be as popular as del.icio.us, so be it. They can both exist.

(on a sidenote, flickr has some serious i18n work to do if their marketshare is so low outside the comfortable-with-english world)

Related to this: social networks need traction from an active community to flourish. They need numbers. That's why I think the use of del.icio.us for the Avian Influenza Resources-page from Umich's health library is perfect. For everyone: the library, they didn't need to build something themselves; the users of the library, who gained a good resource; and the wider community of del.icio.us users interested in the topic, since the work the librarians did helps improve the general body of information in the whole system. I have much respect for my colleagus who built the brand new HvA web resources site, but it's no match.

As libraries, we cannot compete. We shouldn't. On the contrary, we should embrace cooperation, as we should embrace change.

EU public access petition

2007-02-08T11:14:00.000+01:00

Of course, everybody has already signed the Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results, right?

But just in case you haven't yet, please do it now. Thanks!

Edu Exchange - lessons learned from the banks

2006-12-12T09:57:00.000+01:00

[Flickr: IMG_1327, driek ]

On the Edu Exchange conference, one of the keynote speeches was given by Gerard Hartsink of ABN AMRO, who is heavily involved in the standardisation of monetary traffic between banks. A great idea, though somewhat flawed in execution: he clearly gave the default talk, which had way too many details of the intricacies of the problems encountered [1]. The talk would've been better if he had focussed more on the general problems, rather than for instance, showing all the consortium members in a long series of logo-filled slides.

Still, the final slide with the lessons learned from the troubles of standardisation had some nice ones for our field.

Put the customer in the centre of the chain, not the supplier.

A good reminder - especially since the customers are usually not involved at all in the work, they are the ones we're working for.

Don't start a standardisation process without a common vision.

The Dutch banks learned it the hard way, sinking > 200 mln EUR in to incompatible 'chip wallet' systems.

Business managers, not the experts on standards need to be leading.

Interesting tidbit: One of the directors of Ahold, Ab Heijn, played an instrumental role in the international barcode association.

Do not hand over the control over standards to consultants or service providers.

Not only is the standard at risk, less involvement of the partners means less commitment.

All easier said than done, and all cliches, of course. But still true.

[1] As it turns out in the EU, most countries have developed their own system for paying with debit cards, and even if the same technical standard was used such as in Belgium and Germany, the content standard makes cooperation even harder. An extra layer on top of the national standards is needed to make it possible; the architecture of which is pretty nightmarish.

thoughts on Daring Fireball's review of Stikkit

2006-11-10T23:35:00.000+01:00

John Grubers review of stikkit is worth a read, for a number of reasons. First of all, it's thorough on designing an interface, which sounds familiar to us information professionals, right? Or at least, it should. Anyway, Daring Fireball has established itself as a place to watch for excellent interface critiques, with an eye for those details that make all the difference for the overall experience. For instance, the section AJAX vs. PERMALINKS nails the danger of over-using ajax-techniques to repeat the mistake of frame-based navigation in the web1.0 days. Gruber does this by describing exactly what's wrong with non-changing location-bars.

Apart from that, this review is interesting because stikkit is. They're more than yet another backpack or delicious clone. They're trying to do something new: mixing different types of information, and letting the system work out what you're trying to say. This works with simple conventions in the text, rather than knobs and buttons. For instance, type 'at' and a time, and the note is automagically put in the calendar. If it works, it means that the Google Generation users are still willing to learn a vocabulary - against the holy grail of simplicity.

This is a big if. Quoting from Gruber's concluding thoughts:

I remain unconvinced that it’s a good idea in the first place. Stikkit strikes me as a very good implementation of a flawed premise. The main problem is that with an utter lack of UI-enforced structure, it’s hard to get a sense of what the rules are.
(...snip...)
When you present features as being magical — “just type a date and it knows it’s an event” — it’s confusing and irritating when the magic runs out.

Translating this to the challenge of re-thinking the academic information flow: if this magic works in stikkit, it will be a must for the Scholary Workbench. I know several researchers who are swear by Backpack. It's a great collaboration tool. I wouldn't be surprised if they move over.

The magic needs to work reliably; it needs to be discovered gradually and with ease; in short, it needs to Just Work®. Time to spend some r&d on this.

Famous last words

2006-10-18T15:13:00.000+02:00

I ended my last post that I was preparing for the Primo presentation... famous last words. It's been more than two weeks now.

I've got a long draft on Primo, waiting to be published, originally titled "an offer you can't refuse?". That should give an idea about my thoughts. But I don't want to get dooced.

There's a lot to be said, if only about the vision inside Primo. And the presentation was not shrouded in NDA's. So I'll have to look at it more carefully, considering the internal upheaval, but I will walk the walk, and post this post. Mmmmkay?

Too old for that

2006-09-28T13:45:00.000+02:00

A team of students is investigating the use of social bookmarking in academic education as placement project [1]. I had coffee with two of them yesterday. Of course, the conversation turned to the social web, and came onto the myspace-phenonemon (which in Holland means hyves.nl).

Student #1: "Well, I used to be on hyves... but I'm too old for that now."

Student #2: "Yeah, now you've got a girlfriend."

Mind you, these guys are barely twenty.

The technology gap is no longer one wide crack between generations. We're dealing with technology craquelée! [2] Not that this makes it easier to bridge it, but at least the burden's distributed more evenly.

Back to work - preparing for a presentation of Ex Libris' Primo tomorrow. Eager!

Notes
[1] the results of which will be published in the open, of course.
[2] technology craquelée, it sounds like the perfect name for a blog.

boasting a boost

2006-09-18T15:15:00.000+02:00

Lists are lists, that is all they should be. A model only as good as the imagination of the creator.

With that out of the way, let me boast for a moment! Webometrics ranks my uni as the number 21 within Europe on its commitment to open access (July count). That's not bad, and we're the highest in the Netherlands.

There is so much work to do in changing the research workflow, it's hard to imagine how we're ever going to get there. So this is a nice little boost, meanwhile. Onwards!

The perceived value of recommendations

2006-09-14T11:37:00.000+02:00

On the TidBITS Talk list, a discussion was started on the quality of recommender systems. An rather laughable suggestion by email from Amazon prompted the original poster to ask why these systems are still mediocre at best.

It reminded me of the session on the Techlens project at the CNI fall 2005 task force conference. There were some interesting observations on when recommenders work, and when they don't (most in the Q&A, so not covered in the abstract).

There are two problems for such systems: the quality of the underlying data, and the problem of the desired neighbourhood. I'll start with the latter.

How widely do you, as user, want to have the recommendations vary? When you are new to a subject, you want the defining standard works - a narrow view. As you get more versed in the subject, you actually don't want those predictable results anymore, as you will be already familiar with them. Without surprise, it has no value. Different users want different results.

Research on users expectations showed that users were most content with a recommender service if it would give 5 suggestions (in an unobtrusive interface), as long as out of these five one or two would be 'interesting'. Keep in mind though that this was research on users in a strictly defined research field, which can't be translated directly to other fields, but it gives an indication, and at least it is real, non-anecdotal data.

How does this translate to amazon? Like the original poster, I get the occasional amazon suggestion by email, most of which I delete instantly. Only rarely they were actually interesting. As a result, I find them annoying or amusing, depending on the actual suggestion - and they irritate me almost as much as spam.

However, when I browse amazon, the recommendations are much less obtrusive, so I glance at them when I want, and then I sometimes do find something interesting in there. And I find myself agreeing with the outcome of the techlens research: my amazon miss:hit ratio is 25:1, and I would like more hits, but it needn't be 1:1.

Now the data. The suggestions depend on the quality of the data. The ACM techlens used citations to see which objects were linked. That provides high-quality information on the links between objects.

Amazon however has to rely on more primitive metadata, such as the author, and refines this with buying and browsing patterns. It is actually surprisingly good at this, but as with all 'social sites' (of which amazon arguably is the granddaddy) this needs a critical mass to get reliable. In the dustier corners of the inventory, you get oddball results.

(nothing new here BTW - until recently, in our rare books department, the quality or even availability of indeces of specialized collections depended totally on the personal interest of the specialist...)

A good recommender system will always give you some surprising suggestions. It may not always be the surprise you wanted, but if it would be predictable, it would be of no value at all! So by definition, there is a high miss to hit-ratio. The key is that the system must be unobtrusive enough, so the misses can be ignored.

PS: in the long run, this will all change, when the systems will be able to parse the actual objects and build relationships based on the content. There is a lot of research in this area, largely spin-off of 'Homeland Security' projects. But it is still years away.

SFX integrated in search results

2006-09-06T18:40:00.000+02:00

Yes, another TICER-inspired post! FastSearch's Bjørn Olstad made a few interesting remarks in his talk. One of those I heartily agree with: search results should be rich enough so the user won't have to open each line to see if it is actually what he was looking for.

This, now, is where OpenURL resolvers such as SFX can shine. As currently implemented, SFX is Yet Another Button, a separate action - and thus a burden to the user. I don't have the statistics handy of UvA-Linker (the name we gave to our SFX - by the way, why does everybody have to give SFX its own name? It's very unhandy in spreading the word to users. But I digress.) I know we had to upgrade our server hardware, so it is used; however, I am positive it is still not used as much as it could, and that's a bloody shame, for it has so much potential.

And then, if the button is clicked, the services offered are pretty boring. Useful, sometimes; but not inspiring. Why offer links to google and amazon searches? They are a dime a dozen, you get those with your cereal. And as a current student, I probably googled already before I looked at the library's search service.

It could be so much better! SFX should work as a web service instead, that can be integrated wherever objects are displayed. Imagine a search results page (for instance in Metalib or an OPAC) where the results are enriched with SFX services! A little AJAX magic will do to insert a few lines. Direct link to fulltext. The first lines from the abstract, with a little button to display the remainer directly inline (again with AJAX). If available, the cover image from amazon or a dozen of other sources. Cited by links. Citation ranking. For chemical articles, graphic molecule displays. And who knows what other services the future holds.

Not just two clicks and a long wait away (not to mention all those new windows, ugh!) - instantly. It shouldn't be that hard for the current generation of openURL resolvers to add a web service interface (provided they *cough* have a simple and straight architecture for the publishing side).

I'm very curious what the SFX community thinks of this idea. The SFX conference is actually happening this week in Stockholm, so I'm a little late for that. When our SFX people are back from Sweden though, I'll see if I can convince them...

PS: I'm aware I am mixing the terms OpenURL Resolver and SFX liberally in this post, which strictly speaking is not correct. I must confess that I don't know what other players there are on this market besides Ex Libris. Note to self: check this out.

Thinking about the future research workflow - A TICER 06 post

2006-09-04T17:53:00.000+02:00

The final talk of day 1 of TICER 2006 was by Herbert van de Sompel (abstract powerpoint). In short, it was an elaboration of the article Rethinking Scholarly Publication (D-Lib, vol 10, no 9) and the april 2006 meeting on Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories.

It's always a pleasure to hear Herbert talk. He's an inspiring presenter, which unfortunately is not too common amongst conference speakers. When he speaks, he makes clear what tends to be hard to grasp in his writings, that tend to have an information density that is hard to follow for mere mortals. When I read the D-Lib article a while ago, I did not fully grasp the depth and vision; with this talk, the penny dropped.

What really made this a great finish of a a day that was pretty good already, was that this was about thinking further into the future. The other talks were about the next step, current dilemmas, what to this year, maybe the next: using instant messaging and blogs to communicate with clients, or improving your OPAC's search results. All find and dandy, I certainly got some ideas; but the scope of this talk was a much wider vision, which might take a decade to come to fruition.

We've made the first transition, from writing articles on paper, to writing articles electronically. But the idiom of the research workflow, the way scientists and scholars cite sources, has not changed yet. We've merely swapped one medium for another. With this transition well on its way, it's time to re-think the whole scholarly workflow.

And the first step is to build a uniform mechanism for referencing objects. This is necessary for machines to follow the research workflow from one source to another, which will make it possible to build all kind of services on top of the objects. Think recommenders on basis of recent citations (recent as in: without the publication lag, that can run up to two years for slow-moving journals!). Think overlay journals that work. Think archiving services (LOCKSS) that function automatically. It could work! And if anyone could pull it off, it's van de Sompel, who brought us the OAI and OpenURL architecture (*).

But even if this particular direction won't be not the way, it is refreshing to think beyond the normal event horizon. The digitilization of the research workflow can mean so much more than the way the system is growing now, which, in Herberts words, is nothing more than scanning in printed journals with the paper left out. The revolution has only just begun.

(*) He's not alone, of course, he's surrounded by some really bright people, and LANL is the perfect place for this type of research. But he's the essential hub.

[Note: what I find very interesting about this proposal, is that it is a step on the road towards the original vision of Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu: an hypertext system where source and target not just blindly link, but are aware of each others existance. This goes way beyond our limited corner of the web, of course, but still].

On mixing work and play

2006-09-01T21:03:00.000+02:00

Hello readers from Library Stuff. I peeked at the stats in a moment of curiosity and was pleasantly surprised. Thanks Steven! And a nice blog to boot - it's listed.

Commenting on my opening post, Library stuff makes a point about blurring the lines between work and play. Funnily enough, I'm writing this at nine on a friday evening, as I'm about to go dancing.

Yes, I want to show my true self here, my honest and personal self. After all, what's the point? That does not mean a full mix of work and play in one place though. After all, I do not live in my library. There's a time for working and a time for dancing. I will do the occasional work at home, and the occasional dance at work (yes, true story!), but both have their own place.

Same "blog voice" talking, just a different focus. Though the occasional vintage photograph may seep through.

Online conference content done right

2006-08-31T09:51:00.000+02:00

University of Michigan is one of the partners in Google's mass digitization program. They are a partner, not a supplier: they're not just surrendering their content to the Big G, but also host the digitized books themselves, and do a lot of research into what this means. In march, they held a symposium Scholarship and Libraries in Transition, with speakers such as Clifford Lynch and Tim O'Reilly.

The content is interesting, but I'll leave that for another time. The problems of mass digitization are, unfortunate as it may be, at the moment not yet relevant for most libraries. But we can also learn from the presentation. Now that's the way to do it! Not only are all the talks available in streaming video, but there was also a symposium blog. A mixture of more and less official posts with sometimes lively comments, made during and shortly after the conference, in which the energy of the event comes through. What a huge improvement over a website with powerpoint slides! There is a conversation going on in the blog, giving pointers to which talks to watch.

The last post is three weeks after, officially closing the comments. The blog stays online. Well done.

For old times' sake

2006-08-30T20:15:00.000+02:00

Analogue books, meet analogue camera.

Being eaten from two sides

2006-08-29T10:19:00.000+02:00

The Register has an interview with Colly Meyers of AQA. AQA offers an SMS answer-any-question-for-a-quid service, is apparently a phenonomon in the UK, and makes a decent profit. The interview centers on the 'demise of Google', though it might be a bit early for that, and Andrew Orlowski is always keen to predict the is nigh for the big G - you've got to look through that (not always easy, but worth it with El Reg).

From a library POV, the interesting thing is the service. This is a service which is on our turf! This is the work of the good old reference librarian, and here they are charging a quid and making profit with nine heads aboard.

Two observations. First, this once more establishes that there is a market for information, which includes a segment that is willing to pay good money for quality. Second, why have libraries left this to the market?

It's a wake-up call. We are being eaten, and not just by Google on one end, but on the other as well.

Spring is here!

2006-08-28T19:51:00.000+02:00

The end of august 2006. Outside it's raining cats and dogs, inside I've just set up a new blog with the name Library Spring. The irony is hard to ignore.

Why Library Spring? The world of libraries is hardly blossoming. Another name could just as well have been Identity Crisis. But it is all too easy to be cynical, an protective mode to slip into.

Third paragraph already - let me introduce myself. My name is Driek Heesakkers, I work in the library of the University of Amsterdam, and this blog is intended as a work blog. It is not official, by no means, but a way to join the online discussion of the library world. I find myself adding more and more comments in my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged 'library'. The finaly drop was that one day after the opening day of TICER 2006, I met one of the Dutch Librarybloggers, just as I was bubbling over with observations and thoughts. Time for a blog on my thoughts on library innovation.

I have been blogging personally for a long time now (available with a quick google) but mostly avoided work. At the start of this experiment, these barriers will stay up, let's see how it goes.

Finally - why in English? Not just because, in the words of Henk Ellerman, English is an open standard, because the interesting conversations happen there, or because I'm used to it (blogging in Dutch just feels wrong). I like distance it creates with day-to-day routine (to which I hastily have to retreat now).