There’ve been some bumps along the way, to be sure (I’m lookin’ at you, SLA realignment name change drama), but for the most part he’s managed to keep people from looking too closely at his vendor status.

And then he authored a report on open source ILS platforms.

From WikiLeaks:

This document was released only to a select number of existing customers of the company SirsiDynix, a proprietary library automation software vendor. According to our source it has not been released more broadly specifically because of the misinformation about open source software and possible libel per se against certain competitors contained therein.

SirsiDynix is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with one of the largest public libraries in the U.S. (Queens Borough, NY) and this document does illustrate the less-than-ethical nature of this company.

The source states that the document should be leaked so that everyone can see to what extent SirsiDynix will attempt to spread falsehoods and smear open source and the proponents of open source.

I’m sure that others far better versed in these matters will write cogent and thoughtful responses to the document itself. I know of an effort underway to mark up the report and respond with some actual research to back up the counter-claims. With all of this serious thinking going on, I think I’ll just play court jester and point out my four favorite bits of the report.

1. The ubiquitous Asian woman who appears on every page and on the cover sheet, and always next to Abram’s name, making it seem like maybe that’s what he looks like.
2. The totally information-less charts that appear on page 4 straight out of the “If there’s a chart for it that makes it fact” school of rhetoric.
3. “Proprietary software has more features. Period. Proprietary software is much more user-friendly” (p. 6).
4. “Rogue programming teams may decide to create a better version, while exclaiming ‘Damn the torpedoes’” (p. 6). (I just love the “damn the torpedoes” phrase.)

Dear Stephen, we’ve seen your infomercial colors now. Next time you write such a report, please cite some sources. What you have here wouldn’t last 5 minutes on Wikipedia.

My first thought on reading about all of this yesterday was that all those pilot WorldCat Local schools must be steamed that this is now free.

My second thought was almost equal parts pleased and worried. I’m pleased that this is yet another competitor against the current lumbering giants in the ILS market, and I like the idea that (if I understand correctly) this will add a hosted option to the ILS market. (Hosted options aren’t always the best, but I like the idea of having it available as a choice for people.) On the other hand, this means that that pesky new policy on the transfer and use of OCLC records really wasn’t just about protecting a bunch of member-produced data after all. There were bigger plans afoot, and these plans involved leaning even farther toward the vendor model rather than the service model. And if OCLC is a vendor rather than a service, that new policy feels even more like a land-grab rather than an effort to protect member investments.

My third thought, on further reflection, will hopefully be less nebulous and conflicted and more grounded in fact and reasoning.

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For me, the topic hinges on three main questions:

• Is this really a change, and if so, how significant of a change is it?
• What do they really mean by “Reasonable Use”?
• And what does this mean for those of us that aren’t in the business of creating and maintaining bibliographic systems?

So first of all, is this really a change?

Karen Calhoun of OCLC has written more than once that the new license is just a clarification of the old license and that it serves to protect the community’s investment in the WorldCat records. She commented on Aaron Swartz’s blog post that “the policy carries forward the principles, if not the wording of the current Guidelines, which have been in place since 1987.” Later she wrote on her own blog at length and again asserted:

The difference is not in the principles, then, but the environment in which the principles are applied. The Guidelines [meaning the old policy] came from the limited data sharing environment of the 1980s. The updated policy’s landscape is the Web and the incredibly dynamic data sharing environment it represents. (cite)

In other words, the old policy protected community investment in the cooperative at a time when mass data sharing was not the norm, and the new policy protects that same community investment in the current environment where the default assumption on the web is that if there’s a big pile of data out there, anyone who wants to can play with it and make it work for them.

I have no idea whether the old policy felt restrictive 21 years ago, but I know that the new one feels restrictive now. It seems to me that the paradigm shifted right out from under OCLC and that reinforcing the principles of information sharing from 21 years ago is akin to re-inventing the information searching environment of 10-20 years ago.

It also seems to me that if libraries invest time, effort, and money into building a massive dataset, the best return on that investment would be to have people (OCLC or anyone else) take that data and make it work for us and for our patrons. This is what we do when we invest in the stock market, or even put money into savings accounts. We effectively sign it over to whomever can take it and make it work for us. The way this new policy reads, it feels more like protecting our treasures by tucking them into a safe deposit box. We rent the space and gain no interest, causing our “investment” to depreciate over time.

So maybe we’re just protecting OCLC’s investment in our data. Personally, I’d feel better about the whole thing if they just came out and said that.

What about this “Reasonable Use“ clause?

There’s also one clause in the policy that I find disturbingly vague. It’s the clause that defines “reasonable use,” and serves a very similar function in this license as the Fair Use clause serves in copyright law. Here it is:

13. “Reasonable Use” means Use of WorldCat Records that is reasonable for the intended Non-Commercial Use and consistent with the intent of this Policy. Without limiting the foregoing, the term “Reasonable Use” does not include any Use of WorldCat Records that:

a. discourages the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat, thus damaging OCLC Members’ investment in WorldCat, and/or
b. substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat. Please see the FAQ for a discussion of Z39.50 for cataloging using WorldCat-derived bibliographic records.

As Greg Schwartz noted on this week’s Uncontrolled Vocabulary, there are a lot of weasel words here. How big, how related in function, and how related in purpose does a system have to be before it violates this clause? And then there are the conspicuous “and/or” weasel words that leave OCLC room to claim license violation if any part of this clause begins to make them uneasy.

Seems to me that the biggest violator of section 13.b in existence right now is the Library of Congress, and that makes no sense at all. But if you think about it, its catalog is massive and exactly duplicates most of the functions of WorldCat. LibraryThing is also massive, but serves such a completely different purpose that I can’t see how it harms the “investment” of the cooperative. If anything, its giving the cooperative ideas about what might be possible in our own catalogs given the data they produce.

Just as a side note, I wonder if they have to grant Google and other search engines the right to crawl WorldCat.org.

Implications for those us in the public services world?

So what. Why do I care? In my day-to-day work, I search WorldCat when I need it, and I’ll continue to do so. I don’t do cataloging work. I won’t be the one deciding whether or not to put the new field that links to OCLC’s license in our records. And I certainly don’t build discovery systems that would make use of WorldCat records.

Well, I worry about two things. First, that this will stall efforts to invent a discovery system that actually works, and works well — one that patrons are happy to use, and one that puts to good use all of the metadata that catalogers put so much time and effort into creating.

I also worry that this move might implode OCLC. It has the chance to take a hard look at its “principles” and come up with creative ways to position itself as the nexis of all bibliographic data on the web, or it could spark its potential user community to rebell and rebuild elsewhere. My favorite analogy for this comes from Steve Lawson’s blog where he writes:

Coincidentally, I was reading Matthew Battles’ Library: An Unquiet History today and came across this interesting tidbit on page 29 about the Library of Alexandria:

In an effort to stop the growth of the libraries at Rhodes and Pergamum, both of which threatened Alexandria’s preeminence, the city’s rulers banned the export of papyrus. The move backfired, however, spurring the Pergamenes to invent parchment (charta pergamenum), which for its strength and reusability would prove to be the preferred writing medium in Europe for more than a thousand years.

WorldCat has been making great strides forward recently, and I would hate to see it shoot itself in the foot over a piece of papyrus. It also has an incredible treasure trove of information, one that would be a shame to have to duplicate, and one that could yield huge dividends if invested wisely rather than stuffed into a safe deposit box.

Or is this the push we all needed?

For further reading:

• The Policy and OCLC’s opinions
  • the old policy
  • the new policy (PDF) and a summary of its main points.
  • Karen Calhoun’s statement
• Other Responses
  • Stefano’s Linotype
  • Raw Thought
  • Code4Lib Wiki that chronicles the responses
  • My delicious links to related sites and responses

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A year and a half ago, when he released the first version of the SOPAC for the Ann Arbor District Library (here’s his blog post), Blyberg’s extensive customizations were definitely cool, definitely innovative, and definitely had potential. He was working hard to put lipstick, a wig, and a dress on his pig. Well, now he’s covered the pig altogether. I won’t get into details (mostly because I only barely understand them myself), but he has coaxed his Drupal-based web site to pull information from their ILS rather than pushing the searcher into the ILS’s environment.

Other people have tried to insert new interfaces between their ILS and their patrons with more or less success, but I think Blyberg has just shown us an example of this type of project that not only works well (drawing on information from the ILS, from a local database of user-generated content, and potentially from a much larger database of user-generated content from other libraries), and is ILS-agnostic, butthat also looks good.

Here’s the diagram he uses to explain where all the information comes from:

And here’s what the catalog looks like (notice the juicy tags on the left):
When you do a search, results appear in the main content area of this same screen, fully themed to match the site. So beautiful!

To say I’m jealous is an understatement. If we can’t bring ourselves to migrate ILSs, I want something like this. But I do have two reservations: this still requires the discovery layer to harvest and store information from the ILS, and that pig is still under there somewhere. As far as I can tell, the ILS is still locking down untold treasures in the form of data that catalogers have worked so hard to include in our records and it’s preventing us from exploiting that data fully. An actual relational database as the foundation for bibliographic information would make me so very happy. Still, this is really really exciting. I can’t wait to see if other libraries pick up this open source software and continue to develop it further.

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One thing it doesn’t do well, though, is let me link to a specific record. I can’t send a link to a student and say “Here, this is the journal I was telling you about.” I can do this at WorldCat.org, though, and that’s a much better interface for students and faculty anyway. I wish there were a “link to this record” in FirstSearch, or at least a “View this record at WorldCat.org,” but since there isn’t, here’s what I do.

1. Do all my behind-the-scenes advanced searching in FirstSearch (when appropriate).
2. Find what I’m looking for.
3. Do a little happy dance in my chair.
4. Copy the OCLC number.
5. Open a new tab and click the bookmark I’ve names “WorldCat Link Base.” This contains the base of WorldCat.org’s permanent URL. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/
6. Paste the OCLC number onto the end of that URL and hit enter.
7. Et Voila! Stable URL to the bibliographic record of whatever-it-is I wanted to send to somebody, complete with a friendly interface.

The trick comes when they’re off campus and don’t have pre-loaded links to our Interlibrary Loan system. I wonder if it’d be possible to go through our proxy server for that. If so, I’ll have to change my link base… Hmm…. things to ponder. And wouldn’t it be nice if I knew javascript and could make a bookmarklet that would do that to OCLC numbers for me, and maybe copy the full stable URL to my clipboard?

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Well, today Tim and LibraryThing have made that dream come true, or at least begin to come true. He lays out all the details (how to do it, what you’ll get, and what you should know before getting started) in this blog post.

Libraries of the world, Rejoice!!!

[Update 8/12: They raised the limit on the number of covers you can pull in per day.]
[Update 8/13: The LibraryLaw Blog thinks about the copyright implications of LibraryThing's project. Don't worry, Mary doesn't slam the project. She just wonders about it, and presents us with section 113(c) as the possible best exception to exclusive rights for LibraryThing's purposes.]

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A fair number have seen this happen with Twitter lately. Things got so unstable that finally, last week, a bunch of librarians fled to FriendFeed. I don’t often post about this kind of site, mainly because I’m really not in the market for more followers, but last week this whole saga got me to thinking about what it was we liked about Twitter, what it is that I don’t like about FriendFeed, and how this resonates with similar sagas I’m witnessing elsewhere in my life (namely, the Impending Moodle Bloat, and the Continuing Adventure of the Library Catalog).

Since nobody needs to know everything I think about Twitter and FriendFeed, here’s the key difference as they apply to my needs and my preferences. Twitter does a small set of functions and (when it’s functioning properly) does them well. It concentrates on reverse-chronological order, brevity (which forces a certain kind of creativity), and makes its other features slave to those two governing laws. FriendFeed is intended to aggregate stuff and allow conversations to spring up around that stuff. If I wanted, I could share all my bookmarks and photos and blogs and twitter stream and, and, and… basically anything with a feed and a few things without feeds. It’s kind of like the Facebook of microblogging. You can add all kinds of things to it and it does it’s best to present all that stuff in a way that makes sense. And for me, this overabundance of features diluted the site’s effectiveness (though I know others who love it). It ended up eating up more of my time than I wanted (even after I “hid” pretty much everything that people added to their lifestreams) because I had no good way to mentally mark a conversation as “read” since there might be new comments on it, and while I was reading things the screen might reorganize itself so I’d have to go back and figure out what was new and what was old all over again. Non-static reverse chronological order takes more mental energy than I would have thought.

Well, all of this reminded me of some of the worries I have for Moodle. As people come up with all kinds of new things that it could do and new ways to feed information into and out of it and new roles it could fill, will it lose focus enough to hamper its ability to do core functions well? What are it’s core functions, anyway? As it moves from being a “course” management system to a “learning” management system, will it go through Twitter-ish frantic instability?

And, of course, when I think of systems that try to do too many things and therefore fail to do any one thing well, I immediately think of library catalogs and the ILSs of which they are a part.

So after I’d convinced myself that every application should strive to do one thing or a small set of things, and do those things really well, I realized it’s not that simple. The tricky bit is that not everyone’s workflow and preferences are the same. So how do you build a system with mass appeal that only does a few things?

And since I have no answers for these questions, I’ll leave you to answer them for me while I ponder the temptation to do all things for all people after learning that you do one thing really well.

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Here’s the basic content of my ten minute part of this presentation, fleshed out slightly from my speaking outline:

Introduction
Our task force on the future of the catalog grew out of a series of conversations our libraries had been having over the course of last year about our catalogs. After one particularly interesting meeting at which 5 groups proposed their idea of a next-generation catalog, our directors commissioned us to formulate a plan that would propose solutions for the current problems with the catalog, and would suggest how we might enact those solutions.

It’s important to note that we only discussed the front end (the user interface). We deliberately chose to ignore the “back room” functions in the hopes that a narrower focus would give us a useful entry into the broader set of ILS issues and a sturdier framework for further discussion.

The Problems
The problems we identified can be loosely grouped around the three purposes of library catalogs, as described by Charles Cutter back in 1876. Remember that catalogs exist to locate, collocate, and advise (to find things, find things like a given thing, and help researchers determine the usefulness of things). So, how do our catalogs measure up?

• Locate: Our systems do a decent job at this if and only if our researchers find their way into our catalogs.
• Collocate: Our systems work decently well as gathering toolsas long as researchers want to gather things according to author or subject heading, and as long as the available subject headings resonate with the researcher’s information need. But with the rise of interdisciplinarity and with increasing amounts of information available on the free web, these institutionalized gathering systems are becoming less and less comprehensive.
• Advise: Our catalogs do not do a good job of providing flexible and robust ways of assessing an item’s value and recommending further action. It seems like only yesterday that tables of contents were a luxury, and even now they are unevenly applied. Modern systems, though, are capable of much more robust description (to the point of showing the thing itself, the full text), and they are capable of learning from user behavior and from other supplemental data to recommend action.

In addition to these rather fundamental problems, our researchers are becoming used to working with systems that leverage massive amounts of data (data drawn from all that information we’ve been adding to records for years but never using… data drawn from user behavior… data drawn from all sorts of new places) in order to create rich and personalized experiences online. They are also increasingly expecting to be able to search at the collection level, the item level, and even within items. And they need access to these collections from sources that help them make wise and informed decisions about which collections, items, and parts of items will fill their information needs.

Our Conclusions?
Unsurprisingly, our taskforce concluded that our catalogs are not flexible enough to meet these goals. What’s worse, we learned that the underlying structure of our systems is restricting enough that simply adding little widgets will not fix the fundamental, silo-ish tenancies of our catalogs.

So we set out to describe solutions to these problems, but decided to back up and envision these solutions from the ground up: from the philosophies and architectures that make up our “Catalog Credo,” the three fundamental principles on which we believe future systems should be built and against which any system we adopt should be measured. You have the report that we drafted, so I’ll skip the details and just hit the highlights.

Principle 1: Flexible data feeding flexible tools
Freeing data is, perhaps, the most important of our three principles. Basically, this means that we want to become a useful part of the Internet rather than re-invent the Internet. We want to feed our data out to other systems rather than incorporate “all useful information” into our system. This way, we can maintain the powerful and important coherence of our selected material without developing barriers between this material and the free web or other information tools our researchers use.

According to this principle, we advocate that libraries provide “an” access and discovery system rather than “the” access and discovery system. This system is essentially an interface capable of interpreting a wide variety of standards-based data that can be drawn from many sources, including our inventory. We of all people recognize that metadata is fundamentally communicative, so we should allow it to communicate.

This principle also assumes that our inventory could be fed to other systems. This way researchers can mash our content up with other content that they find indispensable, or with programs that fit their workflow.

Principle 2: Intellectual connectivity between resources
This principle relates directly to the “Advise” purpose that Cutter identified. It means that our new catalogs should guide researchers through the system and through the web of related resources. Things like FRBR, faceting, citation linking, and recommender systems (based on user-generated content, user behavior, and who knows what else) could help our catalogs fulfill this principle.

Principle 3: Interactivity
Our system should be able to interact with other systems and with our researchers. Researchers should be able to add content to the system (tagging, rating, etc.) and suck content out of the system (saving, sending, bookmarking, etc.). In this way, researchers can help us build the intellectual connections between items that we mentioned in Principle 2.

(At this point, I turned it over to my colleague who explained our timeline for change and what our next steps would be.)

I just have to say that after all of this I had my first opportunity to hear Josh Ferraro speak about Liblime, Open Source ILSs, and Koha, and may I say? Impressed. The rate of development, the flexibility, the “of course, you always have access to your SQL database,” the flexibility… and did I mention the flexibility? The rate of development? Yeah… Impressed.

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But then we held a “debate” between five teams of librarians each proposing an alternative to our current systems. Our biggest surprise that day was the amount of agreement between groups and audience members about a) the need for change and b) the types of things that need to change. (Here’s a quick list of features and functions we liked, none of which are surprising.) At the conclusion of that meeting, the directors of our libraries charged a group of volunteers to actually map out our movement forward.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, this group of volunteers met, thought, discussed, and drafted a report. You can read it on the wiki if you want, or the PDF (which is prettier). It’s definitely a first step, but the group felt that we needed to clear up the first step first. You’ll notice, though, that we clearly and explicitly state that we want some kind of drastic change in the near future, and we map out a few key actions that will start us moving toward that change.

Now it’s been delivered to the MnObe directors. We’ll see what happens. I’m having to work a lot harder to keep from getting too excited now that we’ve actually formally recommended action.

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Four groups of librarians presented their visions of what this future might look like using a combination of examples already extant (WorldCat in many paid and free forms, Koha, NCSU’s Endeca interface, Google, LibraryThing for Libraries, etc.) and “what if” ideas drawing from the world of Web 2.0 and the hope that search algorithms will continue to evolve. Then we broke into groups to discuss what we’d heard and add our thoughts. And finally we reported to the group any ideas, concerns, questions, or random thoughts our discussion groups had generated.

Even more interesting than these presentations, though were two revelations. First, only one of us indicated she liked our current catalog (which is not a smear against any particular catalog, since we all used different ILSs, but against the ILS landscape in general). And second, we learned that when it comes to thinking up feature and function lists, there was a large degree of consensus, regardless of school affiliation or job description. We wanted all the usual social web features, web 2.0 discovery aids, and recommendations based on user behavior… all of that. Plus we wanted the option to search the full-text of our books’ tables of contents, introductions, bibliographies, and indices.

One group even decided that we need to ditch the name “Catalog.” In fact, we were so busy ditching names that all we could come up with was “up-pushing thing” (based on the idea that whatever tool or system of tools we come up with should be able to push relevant/important results up from a pool of articles, books, archival material, images, recordings, web pages, and anything else the library might care to point people toward). Oh, and this tool’s uber-descriptive name is only proper if accompanied by a hand motion that would take far too long to describe, but involves moving upward…

We still aren’t quite sure about a couple of things (the role of metadata, privacy, how long some of the transitional technologies and solutions we identified might need to be kept around, etc.). But we’ve only met once…

At the end of the day, the directors of our respective libraries stood up and reported where each library stands in respect to its ILS. These ranged from “thinking about thinking about changing” to “actively exploring alternatives,” but it was nice to get that up front. It was especially nice to get that cleared up because after that they called for volunteers to work on behalf of all of these schools to explore future options. And somehow (not quite sure what possessed me…) I ended up on this Think Group with 7 or 8 other librarians from around the state.

So here I am… thinking about thinking about the future of OUR catalog. I’m a little worried that this will be a lot of work, and that it’ll turn out we don’t actually do anything. (And I DEFINITELY don’t believe what one director said: “think as if money is no object.” We tried that for another and much smaller decision and got burned. Money is always an object.) But at the very least, I can contribute my year’s worth of accumulated information on this topic, and maybe set up a wiki for us…

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