Mark, all
³getting away from ILS and OPAC-centric thinking² sounds like a useful step,
and weıve certainly been amongst those banging the ³get[ting] the library
and library resources to a public place with traffic² drum since well before
I joined Talis last September.
Iıd also probably agree with Markıs note of caution around ³hooking the
library cart to the Amazon or Google horse² issue, although there are plenty
of ways to engage nimbly and openly with Google, Amazon, and their peers; we
donıt need to commit wholesale to just one, and we donıt need to give up
truly important key attributes of the library along the way.
Demonstrators like Whisper (www.talis.com/tdn/whisper/) show some of whatıs
possible here, and thereıs no reason that the library or (shock! Horror!)
the user couldnıt make the call as to which online bookstore slotted in to
the picture. Web Services are a quite wonderful thing. Efforts to make their
application more consistent such as those weıre reaching out to people
with via the TDN (http://tdn.talis.com/) can only help here in breaking down
some of the artificial barriers that vendors and libraries have built over
the years.
The Mashing up the Library competition (www.talis.com/tdn/competition) we
announced last week is part of an effort to raise awareness of some of these
issues, with an emphasis upon the technical end of the issues spectrum.
Given that we have the systems we have, and that we maybe wouldnıt choose to
start from where we are, what can we do to make existing data work harder,
what can we do to expose it in interesting new places, and to combine it
with other resources from inside or outside the library? Thatıs what weıre
keen to explore, and Iıd invite anyone to submit an entry to show the
community some of whatıs possible.
A lot of interesting things have been done already, and weıve seen a couple
of them in response to Markıs post. The forums associated with the
competition might be a useful place to expose these and other existing
examples, in order that we can all learn from those who have already begun
experimenting in this area. Why not, even, submit your existing experiments
as entries to the competition?
For those without the technical wherewithal to build an entry, weıre hoping
that the OIdeası forum associated with the competition will serve as a place
in which anyone could feel free to contribute a suggestion for ways in which
they might like to see the libraryıs online service improved or enhanced by
some form of mashup.
As with the rest of the TDN, contributions are welcome from and open to
the whole library community, and permissively licensed using licenses such
as those from Creative Commons.
Paul
On 15/6/06 15:50, Andrews, Mark J. wrote:
> Andy, Ross (and anybody on the list),
>
> Did you pick up Mack's comment "...wouldn't it be good to try an ILS/Amazon or
> ILS/Google mash-up?" Or words to that effect, I don't want to put words in
> anyone's mouth. Is anybody doing this? Is it a good or bad idea? Good idea:
> it gets away from ILS and OPAC-centric thinking, and (this is important) gets
> the library and library resources to a public place with traffic. More on why
> this is important presently. Bad idea: hooking the library cart to the
> Amazon or Google horse has brand, site focus and privacy implications, to name
> a few things just off the top of my head.
>
> - Brand: conflating a commercial brand with an institutional one, be that
> institution a local governmental subdivision or an educational institution.
> Seems to me that relationship would have to be worked out in some legal and
> fiscal way.
> - Focus: Amazon, for example, is a commercial site; libraries, generally,
> are not. Is some distinction necessary here and can our patrons make that
> distinction. Is the distinction important or necessary.
> - Privacy: commercial sites mine every mouse click for commercial
> potential - that's business. Generally, libraries don't do that. That
> doesn't necessarily mean libraries can't or libraries shouldn't.
>
> Okay, back to associating the library with great, big, commercial sites with
> heavy traffic: echoing my previous post about whether anybody gives a rats
> fanny about libraries any more, and if our attitudes don't reflect a certain
> professional "inferiority complex," Dan Lester replied "no inferiority complex
> here," "here" meaning "on this list." Probably not most other places in
> library land, too. I'm going to try to clarify my thinking here and I'd
> appreciate your feed back.
>
> We can't discuss what an ILS is supposed to do apart from what the library is
> supposed to do in a given context. I keep asking myself "Are libraries
> relevant?" "Are libraries necessary?" The Internet and associated search
> engines have the world into "meatball searchers" (remember the line from
> M.A.S.H. about "meatball surgery," which was just barely good enough to keep
> body and soul together to get somebody to a real hospital? That's what I
> mean). The democratization of of publishing, searching, commerce, and
> software development the Internet gave and gives us is a great thing.
> Libraries, like the vendors who help us, are still trying to find their place
> in the new landscape.
>
> I saw a web site recently, with a caricature of the librarians running the
> site about their work. It was a Shiva-like image, with hands in blogs, wikis,
> catalogs, Podcasting, FaceBook, and every other fad & trend. There was lots
> of chatter on the site about Library 2.0. I didn't have any sense there was a
> unifying principal behind any of this furtive, technological activity. "We
> have to learn about this stuff." Well, yeah, we have to learn about this
> stuff, but why are we learning and where are we going?
>
> I worked 5 years in a public library, 9 years for library automation vendors,
> and 5 years for a mental health agency as the I.T. manager. I can count on
> one hand, not even one hand, the people and organizations I'd look to for
> examples of vision, leadership, organization and managerial acumen, in or
> adjacent to libraries. The biggest problem with the vendors was great ideas,
> but failure to execute them in a timely manner in a changing market place -
> that and the utter fear and dissociative behavior employees have about calling
> a BS on management when Things Are Not Working. Now libraries provide a
> useful service, or at least they have up to this point. We have capable
> "retail" folks, technologists and project managers, certainly for building
> projects and certain technology projects. But librarians are winsome when it
> comes to sales, marketing and a kind of assertive, competitive, fearless,
> shameless self-promotion that, combined with vision, leads people to seek you
> out. Who in business, industry and government seeks out senior library
> management for these skills, and hires them because they are demonstrably
> best-of-breed - NOBODY.
>
> I saw a comment earlier that "the vendors aren't giving us what we want."
> Who's fault is that? Why on earth are we waiting for the presidents of ILS
> vendors to tell us where we're going at the annual user's group meeting or ALA
> annual or mid-winter? These folks work for us, remember? We tell the vendors
> where we're going - they follow us, not the other 'way 'round. Ironically,
> this requires that we libraries and librarians need a clearer, crisper,
> measurable sense of where we're going; what I perceive as the historically
> relaxed method and pace of planning and change leaves us begging for crumbs
> year after year after year in city, county, state, school and higher ed
> budgets.
>
> The vendors have given us exactly what we asked for: software to manage a big
> box of books, and so what? To paraphrase Shakespeare, the problem is not with
> our systems but with ourselves. Where is the entrepreneurial fire in
> libraries anymore? I find it at NCSU with their Endeca-based catalog. I find
> it at Notre Dame with the MyLibrary portal (which came from NCSU). I find it
> at the Seattle Public Library. I find it at Bucknell University. Let's
> imitate these folks, not so much in their technology as in the process that
> led up to realizing "We need a tool that does this. Let's do a project."
> Information storage and retrieval theory, and user interface optimization only
> begin to be useful inside those projects.
>
> The next-generation catalog is a solution in search of a problem. The problem
> we're trying to solve is not entirely clear. If your library closed today
> would anyone notice? If the library had to charge for its services, would
> anyone pay? How much would they pay? What services do we need to stop
> providing? What services do we need to start providing? How do we make these
> services known? Building on past and present success, how to we define
> success today and achieve more of it?
>
> Mark
> -----------------
> Mark Andrews, MLS
> Systems Librarian
> DoIT Academic and eLearning Technologies
> L 32 Reinert Memorial Alumni Library
> 402.280.3065
> mja30807_at_creighton.edu
> AIM: mja30807
> -----------------
>
--
Dr Paul Miller
Senior Manager & Technology Evangelist, Talis
e: paul.miller@talis.com w: http://www.talis.com/
m: +44 (7769) 740083 t: +44 (870) 400 5000
im: talis_paul_at_mac.com [AIM, MSN and iChat]
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Received on Fri Jun 16 2006 - 10:05:24 EDT