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.

Richard Akerman’s recent post highlighting SOA resources at Educause reminded me about the aggregation point on Educause Connect for SOA resources. I’m assuming significant number of those interested in applying SOA to library systems are at an institution of higher education or in some related organization, so I’m adding the RSS feed for that aggregation to Planet LibrarySOA. This will undoubtedly result in a large spike of “new” postings to the planet aggregator, but should settle down after that.

If you are blogging about the application of SOA to libraries and want your postings to see a wider audience, let me know and I’ll add you to the aggregator.

Back in June, Eric Schnell posted a five part introduction to applying Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts to library applications. Along with his comparison of the predominant ILS architecture with Henry Ford’s application of assembly line manufacturing this is a great non-techie introduction to SOA form a library application perspective. I had reason to run across these again earlier this month and remembered that I had not posted a summary and pointers here.

Part 1 is an introduction with a brief overview of why SOA is interesting. Part 2 is a description of the silos of content that exist today which in part 3 Eric describes how the silos can be collapsed and the structure of services that surround them. Part 4 describes the challenges of doing this from the vendor lock-in that makes is financially not viable for SOA-based solutions to break into the space. In part 5 Eric offers some final comments on the introduction of SOA into library applications.

Well worth reading and bookmarking for future reference. Nice job, Eric!

I am pleased to announce the formation of Planet Library SOA — an aggregation of blog postings and resources related to the application of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) software paradigm to library systems. You can follow the topic by reading the aggregation website, but the best way to follow along is by subscribing to one of the feeds (atom, rss1.0 or rss2.0) in your favorite newsreader. Those in the conversation at the beginning are Eric Schnell, Lorcan Dempsey, Richard Akerman, Stephen Anthony, and the Talis corporate blog. If you are looking for an introduction to the SOA topic with a slant towards library services, I humbly suggest you read my series on DLTJ starting with Defining “Service Oriented Architecture” by Analogy.

Adding Your Voice

If you publish on the same topic and would like to be added to the Planet Library SOA aggregator, please let me know:

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Resources tagged with ‘librarysoa‘ in del.icio.us will also appear in the aggregator.

Mechanics

Planet Library SOA is created using the Planet software — a tool for aggregating and republishing RSS feeds. In the case where the contributor runs the WordPress software, Planet Library SOA subscribes to the RSS feed of a category or tag from that blog. In the case where the contributor runs the Movable Type software, a Yahoo! Pipe is used to extract SOA-related postings from the blog’s general feed. (For example, see this Yahoo! Pipe for Lorcan Dempsey’s blog. My gratitude goes out to Stephen Anthony for his example on how to get Yahoo! Pipes to extract content from feeds and Ryan Gallagher for a workaround to a bug in Pipes.)

This month I’ve come across one great article and one great report on Service Oriented Architectures. The first came from Sally Rogers at Ohio State University in the form of an article from CIO magazine last year:

Koch, Christopher. 2006. The Truth About SOA. CIO Magazine, June 15. http://www.cio.com/archive/061506/soa.html (accessed March 27, 2007).

This article does a great job at laying the groundwork for the broad “what” and “why” (as well as the “why not”) of SOA, and I agree with Sally that it makes a better introduction to the topic than most of the white paper that I presented at the meeting. The two best paragraphs out of the article come towards the very end:

In the ’90s, your integration strategy was simple: Buy as many preintegrated applications from a single vendor as possible. That worked for you, and it worked extremely well for the vendor; integrated application suites fetched a high price and required long-term maintenance and support contracts that promised a steady, predictable stream of revenue from customers.
[...]
But the rise of service-oriented architecture has produced a shift in integration strategy. SOA makes the radical assertion that the enterprise application infrastructure is irrelevant. Technology is constructed according to services specified by the business, not by processes contained within an enterprise application vendor’s software box. In this scenario, packaged software is a piece of the service, just another component in a larger business process — such as an insurance claims process that links a jumble of functions and data inside [Enterprise Resource Planning], [Customer Relationship Management] and old mainframe legacy systems. The application’s vendor doesn’t matter anymore; the linkages between the applications is the important thing.

Does that sound familiar to anyone? I’d like to couple this with a paragraph from the report by the National Library of Australia on a “Single Business Approach” (discovered via a blog posting by Lorcan Dempsey):

IT Architecture Project Report. 2007. N.d. National Library of Australia. http://www.nla.gov.au/dsp/documents/itag.pdf (accessed March 28, 2007).

The paper defines Single Business Approach in a library context this way:

Even with a service-oriented approach, the Library’s capacity to meet its directions will continue to be eroded as new applications are brought online. As budgets continue to tighten and the Library needs to do more with less, there will come a time when a large proportion of development effort will be spent just maintaining existing applications.

To address this issue, and as part of implementing the service-oriented architecture, it is proposed that the Library regard its digital library services as a single business with a single data corpus that can be deployed in a range of contexts. Rather than developing separate applications to meet a new requirement, each requirement would be viewed as an enhancement to the business that could be deployed across all relevant business contexts.

This is a significant change to the way the Library currently works. As well as resulting in further significant efficiencies for IT staff, it has the potential to bring library staff together in unprecedented ways to work on problems and ideas and to prototype solutions that enhance the user experience regardless of the point of access.

The Australia report focuses on this Single Business Approach along with SOA and the adoption of open source solutions to come up with a vision to support the management, discovery and delivery of the National Library of Australia’s collections. There is a lot here that could be adopted to other similar situations, such as OhioLINK’s.

Sandy Payette, Co-Director of the Fedora Project and Researcher in the Cornell Information Science department, announced a tentative date for the release 2.2 of the FEDORA digital object repository.

The Fedora development team would like to announce that Fedora 2.2 will be released on Friday, January 19, 2007.

This new release will contain many significant new features and enhancements, including [numbers added to the original for the sake of subsequent commentary]:

1. Fedora repository is now a web application (.war) that can be installed in any container
2. Fedora authentication has been refactored to use servlet filters (no longer Tomcat realms)
3. A new Fedora installer makes it easy to get started with Fedora (with both “quick” and “custom” install options)
4. GSearch service (backed by Lucene or Zebra) - flexible, configurable, indexes any datastream
5. Journaling service to create a backup/mirror repository
6. New checksum features for datastreams
7. Support for Postgres database configuration
8. Standard system logging with Log4J
9. Over 40 bug fixes
10. Many other enhancements

Be on the lookout for the release announcement the new year! Also, there will be opportunities to talk with the Fedora development team at Open Repositories 2007 (http://openrepositories.org/).

This is great news and a major step forward for the project. Here are some reasons why I think this is true.

1. Fedora repository is now a web application (.war)

To this point, the FEDORA repository application distribution has been pre-bundled inside a Tomcat Java servlet container. The binding has been pretty tight with certain dependencies written into the Tomcat configuration itself. That made it very difficult to install FEDORA into an organization’s existing servlet container (be it another installation of Tomcat or Jetty/JBoss/Glassfish, etc.). Even more problematic, there were reports of problems trying to get JSP-based applications to work inside the FEDORA-supplied container (we ran into this ourselves) meaning that organizations wanting to run both FEDORA and another servlet-based application needed to run two servlet containers; pretty inefficient. (OhioLINK was in this position in its early implementations of the Ohio DRC project.)

With release 2.2, the core developers have effectively turned the software distribution inside out. The primary output of the new build process is a standard Web ARchive (or WAR) file that can be put inside any servlet container. The new installation program (see #3 below) comes with a Tomcat distribution, should a new installation need it, but it is no longer required. There have been reports that the new WAR-based distribution works inside the Jetty servlet container; we’re hoping it will work in the JBoss Application Server as well (since that is what we’re using to build our next generation interface).

2. Fedora authentication has been refactored to use servlet filters

I’m not quite sure what this means, but I have hopes that it will make integration with Shibboleth easier. Can anyone else see the path between FEDORA and Shibboleth and comment on it?

3. A new Fedora installer makes it easy to get started with Fedora

From the start, FEDORA required a Java servlet container in order to run. To make the installation job easier for those that are not familiar with Java servlet containers, the FEDORA installation process did everything for you. Now that the relationship between the FEDORA application and the servlet container have been flipped around (see #1 above), the core developers devised an easy-to-use installation application that mimics the simplicity of the previous installation style while allowing others to make use of FEDORA as an integrated application within an existing servlet container.

4. GSearch service

The original FEDORA search service, the appropriately-named “basic search,” indexes only the Dublin Core (DC) datastream of each object. As has been mentioned on the Fedora-Users mailing list several times, the DC datastream is really meant as an administrative metadata datastream and not necessarily the full description of the object; that full description can be stored in other datastreams of a FEDORA object. Not only did basic search not index these other descriptive metadata streams, but it also wouldn’t index the full text of PDF, text, and other indexable datastreams.

GSearch — where “G” stands for “General” but could equally well stand for “Gert” Schmeltz Pedersen, its lead developer from the Technical University of Denmark — does all of the above as a new component in the FEDORA Service Framework. We extend our gratitude to Gert and his colleagues for contributing their work to the general FEDORA distribution as well as to DEFF, Denmark’s Electronic Research Library, which funded the GSearch project.

5. Journaling service

Like a journaling file system or a journaling database, this capability allows one to capture all of the transactions applied to the repository and replay them against a secondary repository instance or to restore a repository from backup.

6. Datastream checksums

As part of its ingestion and maintenance functions, the FEDORA software can now calculate, store, and verify checksums of datastreams. This helps ensure the integrity of the repository content, or at least detect when something goes wrong.

7. Support for PostgreSQL

In the battle between which relational database engine is best, FEDORA now supports most of the big ones out-of-the-box: Oracle, MySQL, and new PostgreSQL. Here at OhioLINK, we’ve started with MySQL but are considering a migration to PostgreSQL as our in-house, preferred RDBMS, so the timing of this announcement is great.

8. Standard system logging with Log4J

Put this one in the category of “playing nicely with others.” We’ve already reaped the benefit of the refactored logging code in the client JAR file in a pre-release version of the code.

9 and 10. Bug fixes and many other enhancements

The core code is evolving along a nice trajectory. This is good to see for the health of the overall project!

Version 2.2 represents another monumental step towards the vision of a Flexible, Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. Congratulations to the core developers for what sounds like is going to be a great release.

There was a great crowd at the University of Windsor “Future of the ILS” symposium. The presentation is available from http://info.drc.ohiolink.edu/presentations/200611-uwindsor-soa/. An outline of the presentation is given below with links into the presentation slides. Amanda Etches-Johnson has also posted a great summary of the presentation on her blog, “Blog Without A Library.”

The presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Other rights are available; please contact the author for more information.

• What Is Service Oriented Architecture?
  • In Summary…
  • It’s About an Architecture for Designing Systems
  • It’s About Discrete Business Processes
  • It’s About Reuse
  • It’s About Web Services as a Means to an End
  • It’s About Standards and Open Protocols
• Why Should I Care?
  • ‘The ILS Market Implodes! Film at 11…’
  • Can We Afford Not To Care?
  • The Alternatives
• What Might a Library SOA Look Like?
  • Ground Rules
  • The Business Processes of a Traditional ILS
  • Traditional and Non-traditional Services for Discovering Content
  • Traditional and Non-traditional Services for Describing Content
  • Non-traditional Uses of Traditional ILS Functions
  • Non-Traditional Locations of Traditional and Non-Traditional ILS Functions
• Who Else Is Talking About This?
  • Who Else Is Talking About This? (Blogs)
  • Who Else Is Talking About This? (Articles)
  • Who Else Is Talking About This? (DLF Project)
  • Who Else Is Talking About This? (CDL Project)
  • Who Else Is Talking About This? (eFramework Project)

[20061116T1222 Added a link to Amanda Etches-Johnson's summary. Thanks, Amanda!]

It is my honor and pleasure to be asked to speak at a one-day symposium called “The Future of the Integrated Library System” hosted by the University of Windsor on November 15, 2006. More information can be found at the symposium wiki. I have a one-hour talk with the title “Could We Do What They Are Doing? Applying the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Model to Libraries” that will build on the library-oriented SOA postings and comments made here last month. (And I do intend to get back to the series — after all, I need to draft a whitepaper for the OhioLINK Technical Advisory Council to write on that same topic as well!)

Two things brought this to mind today. First, a colleague from Miami U asked if he could get a copy of the presentation slides and notes (”Sure, as soon as they are done!”). Second, an odd oversized envelope arrived with an IBM return address in today’s mail. Inside was a “IBM Limited Edition” excerpt of “Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies”. I’m not quite sure what I did in this life or a past one to have received a nicely condensed goldmine of information, but based on the contents of this 66-page abridged edition I’ll be making an investment in the full 350-some-odd page version. (Perhaps I just answered my own question about how it arrived on my doorstep — it is an effective marketing ploy. For any other marketers out there, I would be interested in a complementary reduced edition of an Apple iPod — perhaps you can win me over with a Nano or Shuffle… ).

I know I said I would only be taking “a day’s break” from posting about applying the Service Oriented Architecture pattern to library services but, well, real work gets in the way. Thoughts are still bubbling around — some of them have even reached draft form — but nothing new yet. In the meantime, though, take a look at this DLF Workshop on Developing a Services Framework for Digital Libraries to be held on Tuesday, November 07, 2006 in Boston. These sound like great outcomes:

This workshop will provide an overview of the work of the group to date [Service Framework for Digital Libraries DLF progress report dated 17 May 2005 and A Library Service Framework in the July/August 2006 issue of D-Lib] and then focus on a hands-on approach to define various library/digital library activities. The workshop attendees will break into three small groups to work through the business logic for three library areas: Digitization, Storage of digital assets, and Discovery of digital assets. The output is expected to be a series of flow charts and a set of decomposed business processes and functions that will be included in the services framework. These will provide a basis for further systems analysis in the future as a SOA-based approach to library automated services is considered. Workshop attendees are expected to have experience with library IT management and/or technical development of digital library projects.

I only wish I could be there myself — I’ve already been engaged by the University of Windsor to talk about Library SOA at about the same time — and I’m looking forward hearing about to the outcomes from the workshop.

No Service Oriented Architecture posting today, but here is a glimpse of the topic of the next one — the title is: “Web Services: A means to a Service Oriented Architecture end.” In the meantime I wanted to thank everyone for their public and private comments, and to ask to keep ‘em coming. The big push for writing about SOA this week was a lead up to a meeting of the OhioLINK Technical Advisory Council (TAC) today. On TAC’s agenda was a question about looking at SOA as a design strategy for new and migrated services. These blog postings served several purposes: 1) propel the topic a little further in the library community [presupposing that it was a worthy topic]; 2) serve as background information for today’s meeting; 3) flush out comments from the library community [which it did -- thanks again!]; and 4) form the basis of a whitepaper on SOA at OhioLINK. TAC agreed to keep looking at it and endorsed the writing of the whitepaper. Keep the comments and observations coming!

On a somewhat related note, I wanted to tie up a loose end from this summer:

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.

DLTJ “Is the Writing On The Wall?” — Take 2, Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

I retract the statement. Although it has been true in my direct experience, I cannot find any statistics — for either academic libraries or the broader community — to back up that experience. Thanks, Walt, for calling me on it and keeping me on the straight-and-narrow.