Did you know that Amazon offers a facility to make corrections to its catalog? Somewhere in the past few months someone mentioned this to me and I tried it out. (Unfortunately, it has been long enough now that I’ve forgotten who told me; if you are the one, please fess up in this post’s comments section. It was Ron Murray from the Library of Congress. Thanks, Ron!) And it works! Is this a model for crowdsourced corrections to library data?

Here is how it looks from a user’s perspective.

Step 1. Finding something to correct

Amazon page for 'How to Talk to Anyone' with typo

Step 2. Making the Correction

Excerpt of Amazon product information page with the 'update product info' link highlighted

Excerpt of Amazon Catalog Update Form

Preview of Amazon Catalog Updates

Submission confirmation page from Amazon Catalog Update service

Step 3. Getting Confirmation from Amazon

From: “gfix-noreply@amazon.com”
To: “peter@OhioLINK.edu”Subject: Your Amazon.com Catalog Update Request

==== This is an automated response message - please do not reply ====

Thank you for using the Catalog Update Form to send suggestions for

How to Talk to Anyone: 62 Little Tricks for Big Sucess in Relationships (ASIN 1593160267)

Your update has been accepted and processed. It will appear online within the next two to three business days.
Attribute: Title
Current value:
How to Talk to Anyone: 62 Little Tricks for Big Sucess in Relationships

Your suggestion:
How to Talk to Anyone: 62 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships

Data accuracy is highly important to us. We appreciate the time you have taken to submit your updates to us.

Best regards,

Catalog Department
www.amazon.com

And if you go to this product page now you’ll see the title has been corrected.

Would this Work for Libraries?

If we were to do it, I think it might have to be done by a bibliographic utility like OCLC who has ways to push the updated records to member libraries. Otherwise we run the risk of diluting the corrections across many individual library catalogs. Interestingly, this sort of user-generated correction facility one that the Open Library already provides. (Open Library is a wiki-like service that offers the ability for anyone to make changes to its records, much like how anyone can edit articles on Wikipedia.) So between Amazon and Open Library there is a continuum of workflows of mediated corrections to unmediated corrections for us to consider. This scheme, of course, begs us to consider the notion of distributed version control systems for handling our bibliographic data so that changes can be merged across many sources.

Lots to think about…

It was announced on December 13th last year with much discussion here on DLTJ and elsewhere on the blogosphere. It would seem uncharacteristic of Google to announce something like that and keep the world waiting for months to see at least a beta of the concept. Is there some sort of technical problem with the concept? Legal or business model problem? Or was it just a trial balloon for a service yet to be developed and Google wanted some free market research from the community?

Anybody know?

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Among the many interesting points in the interview was that one of the biggest challenges is to such a mass digitization effort to believe that to digitize massive numbers of books and make them available is actually possible. The Open Content Alliance has put together a suite of technology that brings down the cost for a color scan with OCR to 10 cents per page or about $30 per book. He then goes on to perform this calculation: the library system in the U.S. is a 12B industry. One million books digitized a year is $30M, or “a little less than .3 percent of one year’s budget of the United States library system would build a 1 million book library that would be available to anyone for free.” He also covers copyright concerns including the more liberal copyright laws in countries such as China.

Source: Audio: How Digital Book Collections Will Change Academe
Address : < http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v53/i30/khale/>
Date Visited: Fri Mar 30 2007 16:19:24 GMT-0400 (EDT)

The text was modified to remove a link to http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v53/i30/khale/ on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v53/i30/khale/ on January 19th, 2011.

When it comes to seeking a full-text copy of that known-item citation, are our users asking “what have you done for me lately?” OpenURL has taken us pretty far when one starts in an online environment — a link that sends the citation elements to our favorite link resolver — but it only works when the user starts online with an OpenURL-enabled database. (We also need to set aside for the moment the need for some sort of OpenURL base resolver URL discovery tool — how does an arbitrary service know which OpenURL base resolver I want to use!) What if a user has a citation on a printed paper or from some other non-online form? Could we make their lives easier, too? Here is one way. (Thanks go out to Celeste Feather and Thomas Dowling for helping me think through the possibilities and issues.)

Some sites have addressed this issue with a static HTML form that prompts for the citation information (for example, this sample from Ex Libris’ SFX demo server). That is so Web-1.0, though — you have to fill out the entire form before you get any response back from the server on the availability (or non-availability) of the article you are trying to find. What if we could meet the user where they are with an interactive dialog that would quickly connect the user with the article?

One of the underlying assumptions is that users are still going to the OPAC to do a known-item search by journal title to see if the journal is held by the library in some form. The scheme that follows, though, would work just as well in A-Z journal lists and other places where the ISSN of the desired journal is known. The process starts when the user clicks on a link encoded with the ISSN from the bibliographic record pointing into our new OpenURL link resolver. The link resolver returns to the browser a page that lists articles from the given ISSN in reverse chronological order. (The theory here is, of course, to give the user some results, even though they are not likely what the user wants!)

The page also has an HTML form with fields for citation elements. As the user keys information into the form fields, AJAX calls update the results area of the web page with relevant hits. For instance, if a user types the first few letters of the author’s last name, the results area of the web page shows articles by that author in the journal. (We could also help the user with form-field completion based on name authority records and other author tables so that even as the user types the first few letters of the last name he or she could then pick the full name out of a list.) With luck, the user might find the desired article without any additional data entry!

Another path into the citation results via the link resolver: if a user types the volume into the form field, the AJAX calls cause links to appear to issues of that volume in addition to updating the results to a reverse chronological listing of articles. If a user then types the issue into the HTML form field or clicks the issue link, the results area displays articles from that issue in page number order. Selecting the link of an article would show the list of sources where the article can be found (as our OpenURL resolvers do now), and off the user goes.

Ideally, all of the form elements would be AJAX’d, so if a user types an author’s last name and a year, the appropriate citation(s) would show up. One might even be able to insert this activity in an IFRAME right on the bibliographic record display (if one have that much control over HTML layouts of various systems).

So what is to prevent us from reaching this citation discovery nirvana now? Well, a couple of things:

1. Our link resolvers don’t know anything about the actual citations of items in journals — they just know how to take the citation elements and construct a URL that points into some other system. In order to make this work, our link resolver would need to be paired with a metasearch engine or a comprehensive index of article citations (or both).
2. It would be helpful if there was an ISSN disambiguator to find alternate ISSNs (print vs. electronic, etc.) in order to cast a wide net for possible results. (In other words, a counterpart to OCLC’s xISBN resolver service.)

Two pretty high hurdles. Still, it would be really useful if we could pull it off, wouldn’t it?

The text was modified to remove a link to http://demo.exlibrisgroup.com:9003/demo/cgi/core/citation-linker.cgi on January 28th, 2011.

What follows is a summary and commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting at ALA annual conference in New Orleans on 25-Jun-2006. What I’ve tried to do is collate comments from the panel members and add my own commentary (marked off as such from the rest of the summary) where I thought I had something useful to add. It is my hope that this summary is a faithful representation of the statements made by the participants in the panel. If not, please let me know privately or in the comment area here and I will make the appropriate corrections on the body of the blog post.

Please note that this is not intended to be a complete summary of the comments of the panelists; in some cases I forgot to write things done, in other cases what was said didn’t fit neatly into this collated set of topics. For a more complete accounting of the topics, please see Karen Coombs’ and Michelle Boule LITA Top Technology Trends postings.

Evolution and Interim Solutions

As a profession, we need establish a collective mindset that “everything we do is an interim solution.” When our perspective is that of managing interim solutions, we begin to describe our activities with the language and context of interim solutions — that this is work not completed. For instance, faceted browsing is not the solution. Its adoption is part of an iterative process. (Tom Wilson) There is lots of experimentation in the arena of “next generation” OPACs and interfaces — navigation, scope of OPAC content, consolidation of purchased and subscribed content — and none of them are “good enough” to be long-term solutions. (Marshall Breeding) And if our gaze rests solely on the OPAC, we are in trouble. The catalog is but one source of information about library content yet it receives the lion’s share of attention and effort. (Roy Tennant)

Approaching change with the mindset of managing interim solutions will encourage flexibility and more experimentation. I agree with these statements, and I think we need to be prepared to move a little more nimbly in the coming years. Perhaps not at “internet speed” — we have firm roots in sound practices — but certainly no longer at, say, “committee speed.”

Research in information retrieval is now being explored by those that are not in our profession. We are no longer the landlords of the information space that we were before (but perhaps we can reclaim some of it through a lease-back arrangement). (Andrew Pace)

My recent trip to JCDL brought this home. The “joint” of JCDL is, by the way, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE’s Computer Section — nary a “library organization” in sight for this “digital library” conference. There is top-notch information retrieval experiments and practices being explored here…stuff that we could apply or consider applying to our own systems.

There has been lots of consolidation in the business side of the library automation industry, but it is still fragmented and more consolidation will be coming. The future will have fewer companies and probably a fewer number of hopefully better products. The large automation companies are outsourcing development and integration of some modules, particularly for ERM functions (to companies such as Serials Solution and TDnet). (Marshal Breeding)

The has also been the rise of “managed” open source. Some open source has an audience that is wide enough to be community-maintained (the Apache web server, for instance). For applications of a more limited interest, companies are making it their buisiness to provide support for open source software (IndexData and others). (Karen Schneider) One example in particular, the field of Institutional Repositories was initially open source, but this capability is now being marketed as a complimentary part of an ILS. This puts institutional repository capabilities into the hands of more institutions. (Clifford Lynch)

Focus on the Service Aspects

The results of the mass-digitization efforts will change library operations. What is the role of library if everyone has content on their gizmo? Our role must be to provide services on that content. (Eric Morgan)

Faceted Browsing

NCSU’s Endeca-enabled catalog is part of a long-term strategy for improving access to the items in the catalog; is is not the end. (Andrew Pace) Any decent search engine in 2006 will have this capability. Faceted navigation does a good job at marrying the search and browse modalities. (Karen Schneider)

Findability as a Service

The recent focus on “findability” is very healthy and the dissatisfaction of the library catalog is part of a reorientation to better serve the user. (Karen Schneider) Software for faceted browsing and personalization has reached a commodity status. Automatic classification and subject assignment and natural language processing are the first part of the last mile. (Andrew Pace)

Along with this has to be the realization that the OPAC is not the center of the library universe; other services are of equal importance to the users. Users with full-text expectations are coming to our metadata universe. And for them, tutorials, screen captures, and desktop movies are not going to cut it. (Karen Schneider)

Karen has a new twist on the “librarians like to search, users like to find” axiom. Our users new expect content — not pointers to the content — to be at the end of their finding process. And increasingly they are familiar with finding modalities coming out of the web-as-a-whole and will not sit through a bibliographic instruction session or watch a “screen cast” (movie of desktop capture) to learn how to use a new service. Think Jacob Nielson here — if everyone is doing it a certain way, you probably should, too, regardless of the fact that you mike know a better way to do it.

At the same time we see the breakdown of barriers to publication — with blogging and wiki software, anyone can be a publisher. Along with the benefit of the capability for everyone to publish, we have the detriment of everyone being a publisher. Should the library offer a filtering and selection service for this content? (Roy Tennant)

I can’t remember the exact context of Roy’s mention of this, but it seems that we should be offering this kind of sorting and filtering service of the “unwashed” blog and wiki content so it is inter-filed with selected and vetted content from our commercially-produced collections. That would be a service to our users, I think.

Actionability as a Service

Eric was talking fast, and so not all of the actions he mentioned are listed above. I can’t remember if one of the actions he listed as “excerpt”. Technology has made it easy to excerpt and recombine pieces of content into a new work and the users have taken advantage of this capability — they call it a “mash-up.” As we put content online we need to bring along the enabling technologies that allow it to be excerpted — when appropriate — and track back the provenance of that excerpted content.

Publishing Platform as a Service

Web pages created in the form of blogs and wikis are becoming the norm rather than the exception. How do we think about of these sorts of things? Content is married to the software and underlying database, and it will be difficult to migrate these things forward. (Eric Morgan) The rise of community sistes (collectively, systems like Flickr, MySpace, GMail, etc.) increases the confusion between services for sharing versus services for preservation. “Over the next few months this lesson will be driven home.” (Clifford Lynch)

This is a concern of mine as well, particularly with the conflicting value systems of the entities in question. As corporate bodies, accountable to venture capital firms or shareholders, will sustain a service as long as the business model is profitable. When it is no longer profitable, what happens to the content on those systems? These corporate bodies also seem to be relying — again — on revenue from advertising to sustain their activities. Despite the success of Google in reviving this method of moving money around cyberspace, do we really think that advertising-supported sites will continue indefinitely?

And everyone is publishing, with resulting decreases in this think we call “privacy.” Teenagers are now being councled that what they put in Facebook will follow them for the rest of their life. (Karen Schneider)

If libraries do service these communities, what is our responsibility to inform users of the risk to their privacy and/or take proactive steps to protect their privacy. This question goes beyond, of course, statutory requirements in the United States and other countries regarding the solicitation and position of information about minors.

Granting agencies and university administrators coming to understand the importance of long-term data management and curation. The National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure will be putting out guidelines on this soon, and it will be something to watch for. (Clifford Lynch)

Network Services

Last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review had an opinion piece by Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) with the title “Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?” (subscription required). An excerpt from the beginning:

While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and assumptions about our work.

Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for creating online content and building peer communities, and — perhaps most important — that multitasking with various electronic devices, often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work. The implications of those changes must transform our publishing strategies. ¹

Does one need any more confirmation that libraries, too, must change? The students have changed, the publishing industry is going to change, one of the intermediaries has changed (clicks-and-bricks bookstores); isn’t it time the other intermediary (libraries) changed as well?

Okay, probably not — if you still need that confirmation you must have been living in a cave the list five to ten years. But it does make one wonder if publishers and libraries can get together as suggested by Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford). (As a recall, an almost word-for-word quotation of Zittrain’s speech: “Libraries are so far the best hope for those in a position to release something” ² under a “neutral” digital rights management system. In other words, libraries can be trusted with the un-DRM’d version of content knowing that the libraries take their role of mediating access to licensed content very seriously and can apply the appropriate DRM at the appropriate time for the appropriate circumstances.)

Footnotes

1. The Chronicle Review, Volume 52, Issue 41, Page B20.
2. Thanks to teaguese1 for jogging my memory

Walt Crawford chided me — rightly so — for yesterday’s Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System? post. My choice of language was, admittedly, sloppy. I was fired up last night…distracted, if you will, by what was happening at a really good conference. Please allow me the chance to redeem my argument.

In academic libraries, in my experience, there has been a decline in the use of library catalogs. This experience could be verified in the ARL supplementary statistics for at least that population of libraries (I think those numbers are password-protected, so it might be a challenge to try to use them). When I get back on the ground and have some time, I will either offer confirmation of that supposition or retract it.

I will dismiss the notion of asking reference librarians how they see users using the catalog because they are too close to the issue. I believe, to use a phrase from Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, that the library community is facing disruptive innovation — the first it has had to deal with in quite some time. And, according to Christensen’s model, one of the traps encountered when faced with disruptive innovation is listening too closely to customers (implying here that reference librarians are one of the key customers of the catalog). Listening to customers tends to drive a product into “performance oversupply” with lots of features and tweaks that most customers don’t really want yet still pay for because there is not yet an alternative. The suppliers are acting rationally, too — after all, what supplier wouldn’t want to meet all of the desires of its squeakiest wheels?

I ask you — does that sound at all like your most favorite (or least favorite, as the case might be) OPAC supplier? Therein lies the trap — not only for libraries but also for the library software vendors.

Listening to ourselves (librarians in general) is what is getting us into this situation in the first place. We keep focusing on increasingly small improvements with a relatively low return on investment while users of a whole new modality of communication (call it “Web 2.0″, if you will) look over their shoulder (if we’re lucky) and wonder why we’re not keeping up.

You stated: “I frankly find it unbelievable that OPACs aren’t being used. Of course they are.” Agreed. They are being used. OPACs are very effective at figuring out whether your library has a known item as well as what titles your library holds by a known author.

You asked: “Are they being used as often or in the ways librarians might like them to be?” Well, I don’t know about the profession in general but I’m guessing not because instructional sessions surrounding the use of the catalog continue (again, primarily in the academic library space) and even librarians will admit to using Amazon or BN.com or the like to find an item they are looking for.

[Since you are not running an OPAC, Walt, I suspect these three questions will have to be in the abstract for you (should you choose to comment).] I’ll ask: “Are they being used as effectively as they could be?” And related: “Does their current use justify their on-going expense?” And lastly: “When is the last time someone thanked you for a new feature you worked hard to get into your system?” If it has been too long, what should we do about it?

While in UNC-CH for JCDL I’ve had occasion to rant with/at some people about the state of the integrated library system marketplace — including, of course, how we got into the spot we’re in and how we might get out of it (and those people were kind enough to engage in the rant). Along comes a series of posts from Casey Bisson and Nicole Engard ultimately pointing back to John Blyberg’s “ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights” that is singing the same tune. There still seems to be a desire for a solution from an existing vendor, and in fact that was part of counter-points brought up by some on the receiving end of the ILS-must-go rant. (Paraphrased: ‘No one can satisfy the need of a library like a library automation vendor’ and ‘As libraries we’re not strong enough to take on the task of building the next ILS ourselves.’) Yet there does seem to be this mounting pressure to get control again over our data and how we present it to patrons.

What’s In A Name?

That started a great discussion. There was this comment from Peter Schlumpf:

The catalog is going to be with us in one form or another. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how the library field is sooo quick to throw overboard useful tools just for the sake of something different. The ILS in its present form has LOTS of room for improvement but it doesn’t mean we have to hide it behind other labels or have to turn it into some nebulous concept that doesn’t mean anything….The catalog is one of the the main interfaces to the library that all patrons use. How can we make that experience most productive? We need to pay lot of attention to that.

I would challenge the notion that the OPAC is a “useful tool” — if it was, our patrons would still be using it. As it is, anecdotal evidence suggest that the OPAC is the last thing they would choose to use. And this reply by Alexander Johannesen:

I don’t think the OPAC will go away, nor that it absolutely must, but the very idea of an OPAC is based on knowing what our patrons want; books that we’ve cataloged. But all too often we have no idea what they want; all we’ve got are assumptions. I think we’ve come a long way, but the time to look anew to what purpose the OPAC serves certainly is ripe.

I’ll agree with Alexander, and I hope it is for the same reason. If you want to call the ILS/OPAC an inventory of our physical collections, then that’s okay. By definition that means that it is not an inventory of our digital holdings. We can have a debate about whether AACR is a good way to describe a physical item. (MARC, on the other hand, as a container of a descriptive record has got to go.) On the other hand, you’ve got to be prepared to add to that debate what is the proper way to describe other assets — and it ain’t AACR/MARC.

Then there was this exchange between Eric Hellman (first) and Teri Sierra (second):

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel that the very idea of having a catalog as an important component of a library smacks of retrograde thinking? To my mind, in a clean-slate NG Library architecture, the library catalog should only exist as a facade that recognizes of the vanity of libraries and the people who fund them.

I can think of no technical justification for library catalogs as we look forward. If not the next generation, then the next-next generation of libraries. The functions that exist today in library catalogs need to be pushed in two directions- toward the user on one hand, and towards global registries on the other.

Along with Teri, I’ll disagree with Eric on the extreme perspective of a (presumably single) global registry. One thing that I suspect I’ve learned with the OhioLINK DRC project is a phrase I can’t claim to have coined called “institutional ego.” It is important that an institution maintain its identity. But I also disagree with Teri about the solution:

I agree that we need to be thinking about the way libraries will look in the future. But to say that the library catalog is serving only the purposes of the people who fund them and feed on their vanity, is pretty strong and misguided. Maybe you ought to sit with a reference librarian and ask why and how the catalog and OPAC are used.

Listening to ourselves (librarians in general) is what is getting us into this situation in the first place. We keep focusing on increasingly small improvements with a relatively low return on investment while users of a whole new modality of communication (call it “Web 2.0″, if you will) look over their shoulder (if we’re lucky) and wonder why we’re not keeping up.

The Disaggregated Library System

1. An inventory control system. We’ve got to know what we’ve got and where it is.
2. A “point-of-sale” system. Yeah, we’re not selling our books — it’s more like a rental. So we’re up to an inventory control component plus a rental tracking component.
3. An acquisitions/accounts-payable system. We’ve got to buy stuff. But I think we can buy record numbers — record numbers that point back into the inventory control system for things that we have, if you will, “backordered.”
4. A description system. Let’s face it — the obsession with which a library describes an item is second to none. Of all of the pieces that could be found off-the-shelf, this one is the least likely to be found. If after all of the discussion of the pieces we come back to needing a really good description system, then let’s focus our energies on that rather than the rest.

With a foundation based on these components — a “Library Service Oriented Architecture” if you will — we’ll be in a much better position to meet the needs and desires of the users today and change to meet their new needs and desires in the future. It’s not everything we need (I hear there is the rumblings of a debate on the cost effectiveness of serials control systems — do we have to have one of those), but it is a place to start.

This is amazing stuff — an AJAX-based video editing tool…in your web browser! I haven’t looked at the underlying technology or it’s licensing terms (the message announcing it says that it is tied to the ‘eyespot’ service) but it may be possible to port this to a generic repository. If so, this poses some exiting possibilities for the DRC!

Editing video in your browser? Try eyespot – the AJAX video editor

April 5th, 2006

Each week at ajaxLaunch, we’re announcing a new ajax program designed to shatter what people think is possible. In the last two weeks I announced ajaxWrite and ajaxSketch. These programs were significant because they load in seconds via a web browser, but look and operate like traditional applications. Amazing technology, but hardly fun. Today, I’m announcing something amazing and fun – video editing. Yes, video editing ajax style – in a web browser like you have never seen before.