Planet Library SOA

As noted by Richard, and amplified by MichaelGeist and Peter Suber - The National Research Council (NRC) of Canada's Senior Executive Committee (SEC) has mandated that effective January 2009, all deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports produced by NRC will require deposit in the NRC Publication Archive (known as NPArC). 

CISTI has produced a press release providing additional details including some areas of potential exemption: 

Wherever possible, NPArC will provide access to the full text of these publications. NRC's License to Publish (Crown Copyright) will be updated to declare its intent to deposit the full-text of NRC-authored publications in NPArC. However, the nature, timing and extent of access to individual publications depends on a variety of factors, including agreements with publishers, or in the case of technical reports the sensitivity or confidentiality of content.

As the architect for the NPArC project, I'm proud to see some movement forward by NRC on the difficult legal and policy issues for this initiative.  The technology is one thing, but as has been demonstrated time and again, the true hurdles with institutional repositories are less technical, and more human in origin.

That said... just a bit of the technology/architecture:  The NPArC project is intending to piggy-back on our ongoing Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) project that CISTI has been working on for the past while.  The TDR is, among other things, CISTI's solution to moving forward with SOA-based article-level content and metadata management.  The TDR - based broadly on the OAIS reference model - is intended to handle tens of millions of bibliographic records and articles - and is planned to be CISTI's primary article-level storage and management infrastructure.  It's much more than NPArC itself needs - but it's planned that TDR will be supporting a number of other CISTI offerings and services as well.

 

David Bigwood on his blog stats:

Making your content available in more places makes metrics hard. Before Bloglines, Google Reader, Facebook Blog Network, Planet Catalog, and all the rest I could get a feel for the number of readers. Didn't matter too much to me, this is done for my own benefit as well as the community. However, if I was in a position and needed numbers to justify the work it would make it difficult. [Catalogablog: Facebook]

David's comments were in the context of the Facebook Blog Network.

I agree. I also don't have a good sense of what the relative balance is between reading 'elsewhere' (in Bloglines for example) and reading at the blog site itself. Nor do I have a good sense of how many people use 'personal' readers (I use the reader built into Flock, for example) as opposed to network level ones (Bloglines). Some stuff I could find out with a bit more effort, other stuff would be much more difficult.

It does strike me that this is an increasingly common pattern. We 'disclose' materials in particular ways, and then they enter a diffuse network of syndication and synchronization.

On a related topic, I look forward to seeing some numbers from those libraries who have been experimenting with Facebook apps, toolbars, etc, to see how much use they are channeling to the library.

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How libraries reach into the flow of their users has been one of the recurrent themes of this blog. Recently, I have been interested to see libraries begin to systematise this and to understand the issues around particular approaches. I mentioned the National Library of Scotland's presence on YouTube the other day, and a comment pointed me to an interesting discussion by Eilidh MacGlone about the initiative:

In conclusion, there really is no place like home to us at the moment - our catalogue is in much better shape than YouTube's. But we think YouTube is a great place to take our filmshows, to visit and meet our users, to build relationships and to interact with them, and perhaps in this aspect, YouTube is better than any online service we yet offer. [WIDWISAWN: volume 6, issue 1, page 4]

This is in the nicely named WIDWISAWN (who is doing what in Scotland and what is needed). The same issue carries a piece by Andrew Youngson giving a high level overview of NLS interaction with several web-based services:

In reality the likelihood of major unforeseen issues and problems is slim. To allow such concerns to hold back making information and content available is to the detriment to the vast majority of people who could access it and enjoy it. The imagined lack of "control" is understandable, but ensuring reasonable and professional judgement is used at the point of creation should allay this fear. For every possible concern with utilising these resources, there are many more positives to be gained from sensible usage. [WIDWISAWN: volume 6, issue 1, page 3]

As we get more experience, the particular characteristics of each service will become more apparent. In commenting about this initiative, for example, Seb Chan interestingly contrasts Flickr and YouTube.

As Burgess points out, though, the best textual responses to YouTube content happen on the blogs, forums and website on which video content ends up being embedded, rather than on YouTube itself. Whilst this also occurs with Flickr embeds, my hunch is that Flickr’s active nurturing of its ‘own’ community around the site means that embedding plays a lesser role than it does for YouTube content. [fresh + new(er) » Blog Archive » Video archives in YouTube? - National Library of Scotland]

Andrew Youngson talks about enjoyment in his note above. I was at the National Library of Scotland with some colleagues from the SCONUL conference. In the entrance were panels with pictures from the collection. One caused some discussion. It was a letter from Elizabeth Taylor to Muriel Spark. Much of the interest was because she signed herself Elizabeth Taylor Burton [*]. I can now share our enjoyment with you ......:

Uploaded to FLICKR 18 April 2008 by the National Library of Scotland, all rights reserved.

[*] Interestingly, this name is not recorded in LC, DNB or BNF authority files.

Related entry:

• A shop window to the National Library of Scotland

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During the deliberations of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (of which I was a member) there was quite a bit of discussion about 'webifying' (or 'webulating', to use the phrase of my colleague Stu Weibel) library terminology and authority resources.

What this meant in practice was left vague. What was generally meant was that these vocabularies were addressable with 'element' level identifiers and were accessible using web-based protocols. In other words, they would become available as web resources in their own right. Before this, the model has usually been one in which elements are added as text strings to other metadata about information resources.

We have now made a set of controlled vocabularies available as web services for experiment. In effect, these services make a variety of subject vocabularies available as resources on the web in ways that individual vocabulary elements can be found, referenced and recombined in applications. They are 'webified'.

Here is how they are described on introductory materials produced for ALA:

Terminology Services are web-based services for controlled vocabularies. More than 4.5 million terms, 2.4 million concept links, and 2 million contextual data elements are accessible to your applications.

Each vocabulary is fully indexed and searchable. Vocabulary data is retrievable in multiple representations including the MARC authority format, used by libraries, and the SKOS Core Vocabulary used in Semantic Web applications.

Some of the ways in which such services might be used were reported from a meeting organized by RLG Programs last year. Example uses would be for query expansion (connect search terms to controlled vocabularies, link general to specialist vocabularies, go to broader or narrower terms, etc) or in metadata editors (provide access to various vocabularies without having to locally load them).

A simple example. An application could use MESH through the terminology services to associate a search term 'giant kelp' with the 'technical' term 'Macrocystis' [MESH, Terminology Services], and then use that to search, for example, pubmed or worldcat.

This is a rich collection of data, and it is not primarily aimed at human consumers. It is intended for applications. Further information is available on the project page and access to resources is available from the Prototype.

For an example of one application which uses the services to access subject terms for graphic materials see the Indiana University Digital Library Program Collection Search. Our Indiana colleagues note that all the usual caveats about proof-of-concept apply here: this is not a polished production system. Try searching for 'grapes' or 'wine'.

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I have been lurking in on an OhioLink task force discussing "next generation" discovery layers. One of the latest postings to the group was by Peter Murray , who highlighted a report from the Next Generation Summit Search Interface Working Group of the Orbis/Cascade Alliance.

The report supports several concepts I have been pushing for a couple years now, including the idea of consortia to support library systems development. However, the more important concept is included in the report’s recommendations:

Regardless of who provides the Alliance’s next generation OPAC product, one of the deliverables that must be available as part of any solution is API or web services access to the catalog. Access at this level is important for two reasons:

... All major ILS vendors but III provide their customers a web services or HTTP REST API access to their systems, allowing for continued development around the catalog. Lacking such access, the Summit catalog will continue to be marginalized within the consortium’s academic campuses as tools and services are developed that take advantage of web service friendly applications.

... The Alliance should strive to create a resource that encourages users, libraries, and campuses to develop services around the Summit catalog. The library community has recognized that our patrons want social tools, which we tend to identify as tagging, commenting, etc. However, Web 2.0 applications like Flickr are popular because of the API access that they provide to their users as well. This access has enabled other web services, individuals, and organizations to develop different methods for exporting and utilizing the images placed within the Flickr photo archive. The Alliance should strive to make the Summit catalog open in this way, so that users and members alike are free to enhance Summit to meet individual, campus, or consortial needs.

Aha. Without using the geek terminology what they are describing is actually Service Oriented Architecture. However, what I am really excited to read is the desire on the part of the Alliance to break library culture and control over bibliographic information and to let the customers play with it. The number of applications that make use of the Google Maps shows how creative customers can be in seeing new connections between information sources.

I could see a customer building a new system in which leverages OPAC data in a weekend which could take a library organization a year to work through. Libraries should be building and licencing systems which exposes our content and data. Let the customers can play with it. Let them mash it up. Let them create systems that fit their immediate needs.

The challenge is that libraries do build systems and services with our (librarian) needs in mind. Our need for control. Our need for perfection. Our need for process. A library information system (or service) that uses a development process that does not meet our internal cultural needs is almost immediately classified as being a failure. We then focus way too much energy doing a post mortem on what went wrong in the development process in an effort to "do it right the next time."

It's no wonder that library systems of tomorrow are really just library systems of yesterday.

It seems to me that as a profession we are stuck in a bad relationship with our systems and vendors. We just can't figure out a way to get out of it. Are we happy that III will not give us APIs? Are we so insecure with our relationship with them that we are content to take what they give us? Do we feel we are that powerless?

The approach that the Alliance has outlined in their report is a extremely positive sign that some finally have had enough and are willing to make the hard decisions required for information system independence.

Photo: "REST eye for the SOA GUY" by psd. Creative Commons.

OCLC library linking APIs introduction/examples.

XISBN, XISSN web services from OCLC, and a Title History Tool based on XISSN. -- Lorcan Dempsey's weblog

xISBN is now well established. xOCLCNUM was introduced a while ago, as an aspect of the xISBN service.

xISBN is now being joined by xISSN, a new Web service. With this service you can supply an ISSN, and find out about any predecessor, successor, and alternate ISSNs and titles, and find the electronic ISSN for a print title or vice versa.

This is a web service which can be integrated into library applications, websites, link resolvers, cataloging tools, and so on. There is also a pretty nifty human-ready demonstration interface known as Title History.

My grid services colleague, Tim McCormick, provided the above detail, and also explained terms and conditions. The XML Web service is offered at no charge to OCLC members with cataloging subscriptions or to any low-volume users; and for fee to others. The Title History tool is free to everyone.

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UK National Library of Health has an enterprise architecture, SOA, using SCRUM method.

In the course of putting together the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study, the authors interviewed the four major vendors of integrated library systems in higher education in the U.K.: Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, SirsiDynix and Talis. Among the “who are you” and “what do you do” questions were two that get to the heart of what many of us are clamoring for from our vendors:

• How do your products interoperate with products those from other LMS/ERM vendors?
• Do you have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

Since three of the four are also leading vendors in North America (and I’m betting the fourth would like to be one as well), I think it is instructive to look at how these four vendors answer these two questions.¹

Ex Libris

How do ExLibris products interoperate with products those from other LMS/ERM vendors?

We interoperate with our own products first (e.g. Primo and MetaLib) but all new products designed to interoperate more widely by means of standards

Does ExLibris have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

With Talis for Verde

Innovative Interfaces

How do Innovative products interoperate with those from other LMS/ERM
vendors?

Our history is rooted in providing products that interoperated with other products. This continues with ERM for example

Does Innovative have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

No. Our aim is to provide best of breed across the whole range of library needs. Of course we don’t stand in the way of libraries that wish for example to add Aquabrowser or Endeca. However we want to provide solutions that are better. To date, we haven’t seen a big groundswell for these types of products…for all of the press and interest it has gotten, products like Endeca haven’t made a major dent in the marketplace.

SirsiDynix

How do SirsiDynix products interoperate with those from other LMS/ERM
vendors?

Z39.50 and other, APIs (SD has been doing this API stuff for over 15 years). We work with other vendors through our certification programme — in particular for SIP2 and NCIP. All other ILS vendors are supported through Z39.50 as well as federated search programs.

Partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

No genuine partnerships with LMS competitors (e.g. to cross sell products).

Deeper integration is available for resource sharing and ILL.

Talis

How do Talis products interoperate with those from other LMS/ERM vendors?

Talis List integrates with all LMSs and Talis Base does too (via Ztarget). Gateway (EDI) will interoperate but it not quite there yet. We work with other link resolvers, self-serve, and SRU/SRW services etc

Keystone is focussed on our own LMS for now but is designed to enable interoperability with other LMSs. Anything new we develop is standards based to work with other LMS and as appropriate with other external system

Partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors

The only formal relationship is with ExLibris. Our Connexions programme includes working with ExLibris with Verde but there were some problems because Verde didn’t support 1Cate (now OCLC resolver), which the customer wanted to continue to use.

In section 4.41 of the report (”The staff perspective on the LMS”), the authors quote a passage from Carl Grant’s blog²: “These companies have become unresponsive to the collective goals of our profession and, like so much of our society these days, are no longer focused on the we but the me. It is a sad state of affairs and one that will not be tolerated.” There is a growing desire from the library community, particularly in the U.K. with the formal study of the JISC Information Environment for higher education institutions, to have systems interoperate in a clean, service-oriented architecture kind of way.

The vendor responses, on the other hand, would seem to be more akin to one-upmanship and isolationism: we look to interoperate with ourselves before others, we’ll interoperate if we’re at the center, you’re on your own if you want to try to integrate another product with ours, we’ll interoperate if others play by our rules. This isn’t what the customer is looking for.

Too harsh of an assessment? Let me know in the comments.

Footnotes

1. Adamson, V., Bacsich, P., Chad, K., Kay, D., & Plenderleith, J. (2008). JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study. 156 p. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf.
2. Grant, Carl. (2007 Jul 4) A symphony out of tune: when companies go deaf. Care-Affiliates blog. Retrieved 13-Jun-2008 from http://www.care-affiliates.com/thoughts/archives/6.

An SOA framework for digital library infrastructure

I have been using the following contrast in presentations for a while. This is to make a distinction between library services - or any other service for that matter - in a pre-network age, and such services now.

Then: people were prepared to build their workflows around library services.
Now: the library must be prepared to build its services around people's workflows.

This is to try to capture succinctly a recurrent theme in these pages. This shift is because people are increasingly building their workflows - or learnflows, or researchflows. ... - on the network. In some cases through a bricolage of desktop and network tools (e.g. toolbars, rss feeds, social networking sites, search engines, etc); in some cases through prefabricated workflow environments (e.g. course management systems, ...). Where resources are not easily available to those workflows, they may not be used.

Of course, putting library services in those flows is not straightforward .... It does mean that the library needs to think about 'intermediate consumers' - those workflows and applications that may sit between the library and its users (search engines, RSS aggregators, course management systems, search engines, social networking sites, cell phones, etc).

Related entries:

• In the flow
• Networkflows
• Boffyflow and spike
• Intermediate consumers
• Our digital identities: bricolage, prefabrication and disclosure
• New spaces
• Getting in the flow: by the Mississipp

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"Over the past year+ I've created well over a dozen or so SOA web-services for different projects. But I recently implemented one I put some best-practice effort into that'll be a model for my future SOA work." includes analysis

"What is news is that Evergreen is the first and only ILS to go into production that does not suffer from decisions made 20, 30 or even 40 years ago."

Rachel Bruce of JISC and Anne Bell of SCONUL discuss the JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study, the reasons for commissioning it, how it will inform the on going debate about the future of academic libraries, and how libraries could use it.

In a recent survey, one-third of CIOs polled had a high-level architecture group. Of the remaining CIOs, one-third were planning to establish an architecture group in the next year or two. What role does architecture play in projects and strategic planning? Hear the perspective of an IT/enterprise architect as he talks about the practice and value of architecture. Learn about ITANA, a peer group where you can engage and learn more about architect as practiced in higher education.

Some items of possible interest which were in a little email pile waiting for attention ......

Arrow

An Australian colleague alerted me to the redesign of the Arrow Discovery Service. Arrow aggregates access to Australian research repositories.

Welcome to the ARROW Discovery Service - where you can search 143,582 Australian research outputs, including theses; preprints; postprints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.

The ARROW Discovery Service searches simultaneously across the contents of Australian university research repositories. The list of currently participating universities, and the number of outputs currently in each repository, is listed at the left. [Arrow]

Search box is complemented by tag cloud access. Results filtering by facets, including institutional facets. Alerts can be set (although it does not have RSS feeds, as I notice Roddy MacLeod pointed out somewhere).

Catalog Widget

The Information Resource Centre (IRC) at Jacobs University, Bremen, has produced a catalog widget, jOPAC, as part of its broader initiative to produce a range of 'Web 2 tools'.

The IRC has started developing Web 2.0 tools. Because we want to be able to deliver digital (library and multimedia) services at the point of need, where our patrons are. And because we want to enhance our services by mashing them up with other available services out there on the web. [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]

The are using the Universal Widget API from Netvibes:

Using the UAW API allows easy implementation within various platforms, such as iGoogle, Macintosh, Vista, Yahoo Dashboard, and various others. This way, any developed tool can easily integrate within any supported platform - some of which you might already use! [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]

See a jOPAC demo here.

I was interested to see the University Confluence-based wiki infrastructure that the pages above are part of. Also interesting is the dedicated focus on such tools that IRC is making.

Linking from Wageningen

As linking between systems becomes more important, so does our interest in identifiers, and in mappings between identifiers. Here is an example from Wouter Gerritsma:

Previously I announced that we made use of the Google Books API to link to the full text whenever possible. We only experienced two problems with this service. First, the quite frequent Google spam warnings, which have been partially resolved but still keep coming back. Second, we did not have the required OCLC or LCCN numbers for the pre-ISBN books in our catalog. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]

He goes on to describe a service from our OCLC Dutch colleagues that returns an OCLC number when fed a Pica Production Number, which they have in their catalog. And the results:

A few examples are:

• Staring, W.C.H. (1860) De bodem van Nederland : de zamenstelling en het ontstaan der gronden in Nederland ten behoeve van het Algemeen beschreven
• Vilmorin-Andrieux, (1856) Description des plantes potageres
• Loudon, J.C. (1831) An encyclopaedia of Agriculture.

Even when the full text is not available on Google Books, the service can be usefull. In the following example of Hogg, R. (1884) The fruit manual, the electronic version of the 1860 edition is available on Google Books rather than the 1884 edition we have in our collection. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]

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I have kept up on the happenings at the MIT Media Lab ever since I read Stewart Brand's The Media Lab nearly (gulp!) twenty years ago. One individual who cycled through the lab is Michael Schrage.

Schrage (author of an excellent book on innovation called Serious Play) has had a few interesting quotes over the years. The one I feel that is relevant to libraries is called Schrage's Law of Networks:

"The surest way to add value to a network is to connect it to another network"

Schrage was thinking about/referring to social networks when he came up with this 'law.' However, I feel it also applies to computer networks, consortium, etc. Replacing the word "network" with the phrase "library information system" a revised quote becomes:

"The surest way to add value to a library information system is to connect it to another library information system"

Creating new relationships between library information systems creates new relationships between information. New relationships between information sources/content then can help create new knowledge. Simply put, libraries can add value to each of our information systems by interconnecting them and the content.

Exposing and syndicating our content so it can be brought out of one information system into another will allow library customers create new relationships between information/knowledge. For example, exposing institutional repository content would enable customers to discoverable/findable from within the ILS or as learning objects within course management systems.

This is exactly the kind of information mashup/knowledge creation that service oriented architecture can help libraries achieve.

I recently came across xignite, a financial web services company. Here is their blurb ....

Financial events around the world impact not only finance professionals but every business. This is why successful businesses integrate key financial information into the processes and applications their employees or clients use every day. Until now, this integration has been a challenge.

Xignite answers that challenge by letting you access the latest financial and industry data on-demand, and easily integrate it straight into your company's mission-critical applications using through web services. With Xignite, you can make your business financial-aware in minutes. [Global Financial Data, News & Information Web Services - Xignite]

I liked the expression 'making your business financial-aware' through web services.

Worldcat.org is a bibliographic 'destination' and is used heavily in that way. For example, it is an important scholarly tool given its topical reach and historic depth. I recently came across an interesting niche use, when I was told by a used book seller that he uses it to discover how widely distributed an item is, or to identify libraries who might be interested in buying an item.

However, very importantly, it is also a switch into the library network. It connects discovery to actual locations, and depending on your institutional affiliation it offers you various services against those locations. In this way, Worldcat.org discloses library collections and services on the web.

In recent years, we have seen many bibliographic destinations emerge. They are variously positioned in terms of value creation. Amazon, AbeBooks, Goodreads, Google Book Search, LibraryThing, Live Search Books, OpenLibrary, the Library of Congress catalog, many national and regional library union catalogs (for example Libraries Australia, COPAC, OhioLink, Bibsys, ....), and so on. This variety seem healthy to me, and Worldcat sits alongside this range as one more destination with its own characteristics and uses. An increasingly valuable destination, we trust!

However, we also hope that Worldcat is also used by the other sites - and it is - as a switch. It is a way for other sites to add value by providing access to library resources. And it creates value for libraries by making them present in other environments where people look for, work with, share information about, books and other resources. It allows libraries to disclose collections and services in other environments.

As we move forward with the Worldcat API, this allows Worldcat functionality to be made available to other applications. So, adapting the xignite phrasing above, the Worldcat API will make applications 'bibliographic-aware'; however, thinking of the switch functionality, it will also help make applications 'library-network aware'. It will allow applications to incorporate access to a network of library assets, and to focus in on particular ones of interest. We can do this because of the collective investment by the library community and OCLC in Worldcat and registry data.

I was prompted to do this post by another interesting post from Mark Dahl where he talks about (my words) how OCLC can make the library network available at the network level, to other applications as well as to user interfaces.

OCLC has this valuable data, and great potential to develop things with it, as well as a general current towards network-level computing moving in its favor. When an libraries compare OCLC's products with that of a traditional ILS vendor, they need to see that the OCLC product is more than technology. Rather, it is an extension of a community, a network. [synthesize-specialize-mobilize: OCLC's competitive advantage]

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Based on SRW/U, SOAP, and SKOS, the HILT facilities will permit such services to improve their own subject search and browse mechanisms by using HILT data in a fashion transparent to their users. D-Lib -- In Brief (March/April 2008)