I'm Tired of Hearing This From Library System Vendors:

"...our development folks have talked about...I'll let them know of your interest in such functionality and we'll consider it as potential enhancement to the system"

I was at OhioLink yesterday attending a demo of the OCLC / Illiad system. Since the presentation was by a sales rep I sent this email to Atlas after the meeting:

"As you may be well aware, a general library trend is figuring out ways to get into our customers workflow. We can no longer expect our customers to want to come into each of our silo library systems. To that end, we have been doing some pilot testing of various Google and Facebook gadgets. It makes a great deal of sense that one of the systems which we can create gadgets for is the Illiad customer interface. We would love to be able to provide our customers with an easy view of their pending requests from their iGoogle home page or their Facebook profile. We are interested in building such gadgets, which are customizable so that any Illiad licensee could modify them for their local system."

"Are their any APIs or Web Services available from Illiad/Atlas Systems which would enable us to build such gadgets for the Illiad community?"

"Exposing such services in those spaces would enable all libraries to raise the profile of the Illiad service."

The top of this post was a part of the reply I received (sigh).

Before I continue, I want to say that Illiad is a very powerful system that can save valuable staff time. The efforts that Jason Glover and Atlas Systems team have made in developing and promoting an open standard for Internet document delivery (even if as a community we continue to support a proprietary closed system as the defacto standard) are commendable.

Based on my past interactions with Atlas, part of me expected (hoped?) that they would have already thought of this. The response is unfortunate. It appears that Atlas has simply grown up into just another library system vendor, waiting until there is a large enough group requests an enhancement.

The problem is that this is exactly the kind of functionality we desperately need from our systems - today. If we are going to continue to rely upon hosted or licensed solutions we need vendors to be thinking about integration between products before we say we need them.

The reality is that by the time that a large enough group of Illiad customers realize the potential of such functionality and communicate it to Atlas, and it is developed, yet another window of opportunity will have closed behind us. Sphere: Related Content

If It's Free, It's For Me (?)

I just read that at midnight tonight (9/18) the NY Times is no longer requiring a TimesSelect subscription to access much of its online content. They found that they could make more money by opening access and selling advertising. It appears that readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect visitors, unable to gain access to articles and less likely to pay subscription fees, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

This is a similar approach that that Elsevier is using on a new website aimed at oncologists that provides registrants free access to articles from 100 of their journals, including The Lancet and Surgical Oncology.

I have also been playing around with a new free music download service called SpiralFrog which supports itself through advertising.

This is part of a growing trend that the potential ad revenue from increased traffic at 'free' sites outweighs subscription fees. Of course, nothing is really free. Most 'free' sites require registration that provides the site with important demographic information which can be used to target advertising, assuming one is truthful when filling in the forms.

Hmm. Knowing what percentage of people are always truthful when filling out the forms would be an interesting study - assuming one can count on those responding to be truthful. The marketing folks probably already know this information and have it in their algorithms. Sphere: Related Content

The Future of Libraries is in Web Services

In her post The future of Web Services isn't the Library website, Karen Coombs highlights the challenges that many of us are facing:

• Most of the library sees the redesign process as about “fixing” the current website so that it is more usable, up-to-date, and attractive.


• Trying to make a site that works equally well for everyone has two consequences; huge amounts of resources are devoted to crafting multiple permutations that have to be maintained and you end up with a mediocre site that no one hates or loves.

She also states:

• The redesign is about defining the types of content the library has to offer its users and getting that content into pieces that can be reused and repurposed elsewhere.


• Focusing on content rather than look and feel will allow us to provide these different types of services. It will also allow different types of users to potentially selectively access content.


• These kinds of services that will make of break a library’s virtual presence not the library website.

In my five-part post on Service-Oriented Architecture, I argue that the adoption of the SOA models can help libraries to aggregate the information they create and manage.

The traditional web site represents a siloed information system. The structure of the data/content we create becomes fixed within the web site. The costs in real dollars and staff time required to export, convert, and import into the new site are significant. The question is whether if we should be spending our limited resources running around on the web site gerbil wheel, or, on ways to better manage and syndicate our content.

In SOA, all our information systems would be designed to be loosely coupled. Direct connections to each of our data sources would be available from any of our our web presences. The user experience is enhanced since they could gain access to any of the resources from any of the user interfaces. For example, one could search the course management system and receive results from the eJournals collection.

With SOA, the library could create a single Facebook-like portal which would aggregate all networked resources. New library 'web services' could be built and simply plugged in by the customer. This approach to the design of library systems represents a radical departure from what we have today. At the same time, it provides libraries with an unprecedented ability to create and maintain systems that can quickly adapt to the changing networked information infrastructure.

SOA has the potential to get our resources out to where our customers are instead of, as Karen puts it spending "all our time caught up in look and not enough time working to make the library meet users where they are and be a seamless part of their work processes."

Sphere: Related Content

2007 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT

The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology, is a longitudinal study of students and information technology based on interviews with 27,846 freshman, senior, and community college students at 103 higher education institutions. It focuses on what kinds of information technologies these students use, own, and experience; their technology behaviors, preferences, and skills; how IT impacts their experiences in their courses; and their perceptions of the role of IT in the academic experience.

The 2007 results are now available. Some random key findings:

- 94.7% use their library's web site
- 91.5% have high speed connectivity
- 84.1% use instant messaging
- 82% has used a course management system
- 81.6% use social networking sites (e.g. Facebook)
- 78.3% play computer games
- 75.8% own a personal laptop. 34.5% of those are less then a year old
- 74.7 own a music/video device (e.g. iPod)
- Engineering majors are online the most at 21.9 hours per week. Life sciences are online 16.3. Sphere: Related Content