Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful to view the pressures and effects of change on our services as a matrix of commercial versus local on one axis and physical versus digital on the other. Interesting observations about the nature of content and our reaction to it can be made at the intersections of commercial and local with physical and digital. This essay uses these intersections to examine the waves of content coming to the library and our ways of managing it.

The first wave

Also part of this first wave is the management of local, physical material. This is usually in the form of special archive materials – content produced by the institution and/or curated one-of-a-kind items such as author manuscripts, correspondence, and other ephemera. An entire profession – that of an archivist – is devoted to this kind of material.

The second wave

The third wave

Does the library have a role in managing local, digital material? Should the library have a role? The JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study suggests it should. It described the impact of this new wave as “applying library expertise to new views of corporate intellectual assets, such as the long term management and ‘exposure’ of both research and undergraduate outputs, in a multimedia and collaborative world.”¹ David Lewis, Dean of the University Library at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, says the transition from purchased to open access content “will do more to reshape what libraries will be and do in the future… but this has not yet been carefully considered or broadly discussed.”²

In some sense, the break between the second and third waves is the difference between the management of content that is “done”, versus the management of content as it is being created. In the first two waves, the library profession focused on the curation of knowledge published in a fixed form, usually by commercial publishers, in a reactionary manner towards the end of the content creation cycle. A focus on curating local, digital content, however, means that libraries can more directly insert their services at the point where content is being created.

One of the criticisms by authors of institutional repositories is the extra steps required to deposit their content into the library’s repository, after going through the effort of submitting it to a publisher.³ From their perspective, they are asking, “Why do I have to do this extra work for my published (‘done’) article?” What if, instead, the author stored their work-in-progress in a library service from the beginning? We could offer the promise of robust backups and versioning, collaborative writing tools, and access from anywhere. With the working draft on our servers, we could mine the text to suggest content from our curated stores, and even suggest potential collaborators based on similarities of works. And with the completed draft on our servers, “publishing” it in the institutional repository becomes a simple checkbox – “yes, make this public” – as we have already collected all of the necessary metadata that would go into the archive package in the repository.

Waves are crashing on the shores of our libraries. Waves of content that represent a fundamental shift from the physical to the digital, and the commercial to the local. Waves of change that form opportunities to evolve our services for library users by offering effective tools for the management of content, as it is created. Are you ready to ride the waves?

The text was modified to update a link from https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/953 to https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/953 on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Adamson, V., Bacsich, P., Chad, K., Kay, D., & Plenderleith, J. (2008). JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study. p. 35. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf
2. Lewis, D. W. (2007). A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century. College & Research Libraries, 68(5), p. 425. Also available from the IUPUI Digital Archive.
3. For more on the difficulties research faculty see with institutional repositories, see Foster, N. F., & Gibbons, S. (2005). Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories. D-Lib Magazine, 11(1). doi: 10.1045/january2005-foster.

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.

As our profession re-examines itself and the services we provide to users, we seem to spend a great deal of time concerned about the way our “web front door” looks and operates. That is, we expect web users to come through the front page of our website and so we agonize over the features as well as the look-and-feel of our portal of information. A section of the JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study¹ released last month suggests a different path for our information environment: one where the content is not bound to the confines of our web portals. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few days and/or weeks that explore this and other observations and commentary found in the JISC/SCONUL report.

The title of section 3.6 of the report is “Visions for Development (‘a place in both worlds?’)”. It spans pages 39 and 40 of the report and is a peek at a library content world unbounded by portals and websites that act and function only as backwater destination sites. I’ve pulled together and reordered various sentences from these two pages that, while I hope remain true to the authors’ original intent, summarize this critical shift in mindset that we should consider adopting:

Rather than creating their own online one-stop-shops using environments created by library system suppliers, libraries really need to surface their resources in the online environments already inhabited by their users. We cannot expect users to come to us, but should rather design systems that can go out to them. Such an approach implies a more open architecture using standards and protocols to be able to move structured information around so that it can be presented in other places. The result will be opportunity for fusion (perhaps synergy is a helpful alternative) — exploiting canonical data by re-purposing, remixing or mashing it up. Whilst the use of Google Maps is the most common mash-up example, it is no coincidence that remixes and mash-ups originate in the music industry, which passed ahead of others down the path of financial and intellectual deconstruction and reconstruction in the digital age. The challenge is whether academic libraries are well placed and agile enough to facilitate their users in exposing and re-mixing content.

It seems like quite a number of such reports have been released over the past year. (Lorcan Dempsey points to another one from the University of Wisconsin, Madison just earlier this month.) There is some U.K.-specific discussion in the JISC/SCONUL report, but there is also a lot that applies to libraries in North America as well. I highly recommend sitting down with a copy.

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.

This year has seen the release of two personal repository services: http://PublicationsList.org/ and the U.K. Depot. These two services have an admittedly different focus, but I think it is still interesting to compare and contrast them to see what we can learn.

The Depot

The deposit interface, for those putting content directly into the centralized Depot repository, has four main stages. First, the “Type” stage, specifying whether the object is an article, a book chapter, or a conference paper:

Next, the “Upload” stage, where one can upload the file and supply a few more properties:

Then the “Details” stage, where the descriptive metadata (minus the controlled vocabulary subjects — that comes in the next screen) is input:

And finally, the “Subjects” page, with an AJAX-driven expanding-and-collapsing hierarchy of subjects:

To retrieve contents from the repository, there is a “browse” interface for looking by ‘year’ or by ‘subject’ — no other browse facets and no search interface. The Depot was just formally released this month, so I would bet that functionality like that is in the works.

PublicationsList.org

The single item entry page is a just-the-facts interface. Note that the content hosting service is only available to those who have upgraded to the “Publications List Professional” version (which costs £9.99, or approx $20/€15, per year).

The system can also accept a variety of citation manager file formats for bulk entry. (See snapshot to the right.) PublicationsList also has a built in search-and-select interface to PubMed for finding publications matching your name and automatically populating the metadata fields in your personal citation.

Then end result is a web-based bibliography with links to the publications (either hosted on PublicationsList or on other sites). The free version is hosted on PublicationsList.org (see the service founder’s page as an example) and the professional version can embed the publications list in your own page.

PublicationsList does provide discounts and additional functionality for groups (such as departments, research centers, etc.).

Observations

The one-stop, redirection service in The Depot is a good concept, too. If a researcher wanted to deposit their content in a repository and they weren’t sure if their institution had a repository to hold it, OhioLINK would be a natural place to look for a content hosting service in the state and we could redirect the author to the appropriate location on a campus. OhioLINK could also be playing the role of repository-of-last-resort for Ohio academic researchers by providing a space and services for published content, whether or not the institution in question has set up a formal repository space on the DRC.

Footnotes

1. For a really good discussion of that problem, see Davis, P.M., & Connolly, M.J.L. (2007). Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University’s Installation of DSpace. D-Lib Magazine, 13(3/4). Retrieved March 14, 2007, from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html.

OhioLINK is engaged in building a “trusted digital repository” on behalf of its membership. As we build it, we want to have an understanding of what “trusted” means, and so we are engaging in an audit process to assess whether we can claim to be trustworthy. This process is panning out to have four major phases:

1. Research common and best practices for preservation.
2. Evaluate the OhioLINK policies and processes against common and best practices.
3. Perform a gap analysis between where we are now and where common and best practices suggest we should be.
4. Propose and adopt policies and processes that get us closer to the ideal common and best practices.

This is a report at the end of phase 1. Earlier this year, two major reports were released that address how one measures a “trustworthy repository.” The two reports are summarized below, followed by a recommendation.

Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria and Checklist

The nestor working group says a trusted, “long-term digital repository is a complex and interrelated system” (nestor 2006). However, more than just the “digital preservation system” drives the management of the digital materials. In determining trustworthiness, one must look at the entire system in which the digital information is managed, including the organization running the repository: its governance; organizational structure and staffing; policies and procedures; financial fitness and sustainability; the contracts, licenses, and liabilities under which it must operate; and trusted inheritors of data, as applicable. Additionally, the digital object management practices, technological infrastructure, and data security in place must be reasonable and adequate to fulfill the mission and commitments of the repository.

A trusted digital repository will understand threats to and risks within its systems. As articulated by Rosenthal et al. (2005), these potential threats include media failure, hardware failure, software failure, communication errors, failure of network services, media and hardware obsolescence, software obsolescence, operator error, natural disaster, external attack, internal attack, economic failure, and organizational failure. Constant monitoring, planning, and maintenance, as well as conscious actions and strategy implementation will be required of repositories to carry out their mission of digital preservation. All of these present an expensive, complex undertaking that depositors, stakeholders, funders, the designated community(ies), and other digital repositories will need to rely on in the greater collaborative digital preservation environment that is required to preserve the vast amounts of digital information generated now and into the future.

The TRAC:CC contains 84 criteria broken out into three main sections: Organizational infrastructure; Digital object management; and Technologies, technical infrastructure, and security. Within each of these sections are various subsections and under the subsections are the criteria themselves.

1. Organizational infrastructure
   1. Governance & organizational viability
   2. Organizational structure & staffing
   3. Procedural accountability & policy framework
   4. Financial sustainability
   5. Contracts, licenses, & liabilities
2. Digital object management
   1. Ingest: acquisition of content
   2. Ingest: creation of the archivable package
   3. Preservation planning
   4. Archival storage & preservation/maintenance of AIPs
   5. Information management
   6. Access management
3. Technologies, technical infrastructure, and security
   1. System infrastructure
   2. Appropriate technologies
   3. Security

Some sample criteria are:

• A1.1 Repository has a mission statement that reflects a commitment to the long-term retention of, management of, and access to digital information.
• A2.2 Repository has the appropriate number of staff to support all functions and services.
• A3.5 Repository has policies and procedures to ensure that feedback from producers and users is sought and addressed over time.
• A5.4 Repository tracks and manages intellectual property rights and restrictions on use of repository content as required by deposit agreement, contract, or license.
• B2.5 Repository has and uses a naming convention that generates visible, persistent, unique identifiers for all archived objects (i.e., AIPs).
• B2.9 Repository acquires preservation metadata (i.e., PDI) for its associated Content Information.
• B3.4 Repository can provide evidence of the effectiveness of its preservation planning.
• B4.4 Repository actively monitors integrity of archival objects (i.e., AIPs).
• B5.3 Repository can demonstrate that referential integrity is created between all archived objects (i.e., AIPs) and associated descriptive information.
• C1.1 Repository functions on well-supported operating systems and other core
• infrastructural software.
• C1.5 Repository has effective mechanisms to detect bit corruption or loss.
• C1.7 Repository has defined processes for storage media and/or hardware change (e.g., refreshing, migration).
• C1.9 Repository has a process for testing the effect of critical changes to the system.
• C3.3 Repository staff have delineated roles, responsibilities, and authorizations related to implementing changes within the system.

TRAC:CC states that the “criteria are written to be applicable to any kind of digital repository or archives.” As such, criteria should be placed within the context of vision and goals of the Ohio DRC. One demonstrates compliance with the criteria through documentation (evidence), transparency (open examination of the evidence), adequacy (degree to which the evidence meets the vision/goals), and measurability.

Digital Repository Audit Method Based On Risk Assessment

The process has six stages, some with multiple tasks:

1. Identify organizational context
   • Specify mandate of your repository or the organization in which it is embedded
   • List goals and objectives of your repository
2. Document policy and regulatory framework
   • List your repository’s strategic planning documents
   • List the legal, regulatory, and contractual frameworks or agreements to which your repository is subject
   • List the voluntary codes to which your repository has agreed to adhere
   • List any other documents and principles with which your repository complies
3. Identify activities, assets and their owners
   • Identify your repository’s activities, assets and their owners
4. Identify risks
   • Identify risks associated with activities and assets of your repository
5. Assess risks
   • Assess the identified risks
6. Manage risks
   • Manage the risks

The report includes a catalog of risks taken from other checklists and repository audits that can be used to spur the thinking of the auditor.

Recommendation

I’ve been tasked to write a whitepaper envisioning a Service Oriented Architecture for OhioLINK’s services and operations. I’ve found a bit of information through my own networking and searching, but in putting out this list and asking for additions I want to be sure that I’m not already missing the holy grail of documents that I could just rebrand as an OhioLINK document. (With appropriate permission, of course.) I’m looking for strategic/explanatory documents over technical documents, although the latter will undoubtedly be useful in later iterations and derivatives of the whitepaper.

CDL Common Framework

The CDL Common Framework is an open, services-oriented technical architecture that provides an integrating framework for services related to digital libraries. As a layered architecture it aims to separate front-end tools from back-end services from underlying data storage so that different components can be reused in multiple applications, reducing the time and money it takes to develop and maintain code. The Common Framework also supports easy integration of local and third party tools and services through a plug-in approach. It is available through both machine (i.e. web services) and human interfaces.

A ‘service oriented’ view of the JISC Information Environment

e-Framework for Education and Research

DLF Service Framework for Digital Libraries

A progress report for the DLF Steering Committee from 17 May 2005. Has headings of Context, Why is a Digital Library Service Framework needed?, Some benefits of a Service Framework for DLF and research libraries, What has the DLF Service Framework Group done so far?, Some open issues, and Recommendations moving forward.

ALA TechSource’s Web Services and the Service-Oriented Architecture

“In an era of computing dominated by the World Wide Web, technology referred to as Web services stands as a key one for allowing computers to communicate machine to machine, program to program….Web services make it easy to connect all types of computer applications to each other. As you will see throughout this report, Web services deliver a foundation of interoperability greatly needed in a world where computer services and digital information exist in many different forms and flavors,” says Breeding in his “Introduction” in the latest issue of Library Technology Reports, “Web Services and the Service-Oriented Architecture.”

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/common_framework/ on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/common_framework/ on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.e-framework.org/resources/ to http://www.e-framework.org/Resources/tabid/609/Default.aspx on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.e-framework.org/resources/ to http://www.e-framework.org/Resources/tabid/609/Default.aspx on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.e-framework.org/resources/eframeworkrV1.pdf to http://www.e-framework.org/Portals/9/docs/papers/Briefing060802.pdf on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.e-framework.org/resources/eframeworkrV1.pdf to http://www.e-framework.org/Portals/9/docs/papers/Briefing060802.pdf on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.e-framework.org/resources/SOAandWorkflow2.pdf to http://www.e-framework.org/Portals/9/Resources/SOAandWorkflow2.pdf on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.e-framework.org/resources/SOAandWorkflow2.pdf to http://www.e-framework.org/Portals/9/Resources/SOAandWorkflow2.pdf on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/web-services-and-the-service-oriented-architecture.html to http://www.alatechsource.org/ltr/web-services-and-the-service-oriented-architecture on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/web-services-and-the-service-oriented-architecture.html to http://www.alatechsource.org/ltr/web-services-and-the-service-oriented-architecture on November 17th, 2010.