By David DormanAmerican Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.
Column for June/July 2000
What if someone developed a Napster-like program for periodical articles? Napster, in case you haven’t been paying attention to the latest in the “Internet music wars,” is software that enables anyone connected to the Internet to easily share their MP3 music files with anyone else connected to the Internet, providing an easy way for those who seek out music to download MP3 files regardless of where they are located. Dan Chudnov, a librarian and systems developer at Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and a leading advocate of libraries developing open source software (see his article in the August 1999 Library Journal), thinks that the Napster model is ideally suited for libraries.
“Imagine,” Chudnov said, “a new bibliographic management tool that combined file storage with a Napster-like communications protocol—Docster.” When a researcher needs an article, she can “just query Docster for it. Docster will figure out [what connected computer] has a copy of that article.” And Docster could have copyright compliance built in so that all legal requirements could be met. Chudnov’s vision of Docster is located here.
The widespread anger and concern voiced by librarians over news that an employee-owned ILS vendor has sold itself for a nice chunk of change to another company that has done a good job of maximizing its profits just shows how dissimilar the conservative and family-like library marketplace is from the manic and greed-infested dot.com world.
Endeavor’s sale to Elsevier Science is a wakeup call to ILS vendors that a race is on to find ways to provide integrated information management to libraries, and that dynamic change will continue to roil the library automation market. Endeavor’s swift growth also serves as a reminder to its competition that a fumbled development effort—in this case by the Notis division of Ameritech Library Services in the early 1990s, which resulted in ALS employees leaving to form Endeavor (AL, Feb. 1995, p. 182)—can dramatically erode market share. DRA’s recent loss of new sales to its competitors is but the latest example of a strong ILS vendor suffering from its developmental missteps.
For libraries, the meteoric growth of Endeavor and its subsequent sale to a division of Reed Elsevier is an indication that third-generation library-management systems represent the end of the centrality of the traditional library catalog. ILS development will begin to focus on the integration of access to all content provided by libraries. Libraries will soon have an opportunity to select library-management systems that offer a more integrated approach to information management than current systems are capable of delivering.
To both libraries and vendors the purchase signals that, economically speaking, content is king, and providing easy and integrated access to all content will become a core strategy of successful content aggregators, just as it has always been a core strategy of libraries.
Customized information services are the latest vision to get hyped in the dot.com world. Your e-business will fail, say the digerati, unless your company offers a Web site that adjusts itself to the behavior and custom profiles of your Web-based customers. This month’s Heads Up Alert spotlights the North Carolina State University Libraries’ Digital Library Initiatives Department, which has developed and hosts “a user-driven, customizable information service” that allows users “to create a portable Web page listing information resources available from the NCSU Libraries.” It’s only a matter of time before patron personalization becomes a common feature of library-management systems. To obtain the source code for MyLibrary, or to find out more about it, visit the NCSU Web site.
Eleven researchers and practitioners of electronic commerce spoke recently to librarians and other information-management professionals from all over North America about new commercial practices and technologies emerging in the information industry. “Electronic Commerce in the Information Industries” was the theme of the 36th Annual GSLIS Clinic, sponsored by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign and held April 2–3.
Keynote speaker Allen Renear, director of the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University and participant in the Open eBook Standards Forum, kicked off the institute with a presentation titled “Theory and Practice: The Case of OEB,” in which he spoke about the development of the Open E-book Standard. OEB sets a standard method for formatting and delivering content to electronic reader devices; Renear explained why it is important and what he learned through his participation in that effort.
A firm believer in looking at digital documents as knowledge-representation systems that need SGML-like encoding for permanent storage and effective retrieval and use, Renear joined the e-book standards effort with an academic perspective and a firm belief that an open e-book standard should be done right the first time and not replicate the inadequacies of the current Web standards. He quickly learned that what he felt needed two years to do right had to be done in six months, or the e-book companies eager to get products to market would not wait for a standard to be developed before committing their companies to an e-book format. He also came to realize that he had walked not into a tabula rasa, but rather into a situation in which many decisions had already been made by interests much more powerful than the OEB Standards Committee members.
While he still believes in the importance for e-books of implementing the SGML encoding concepts developed during the 1980s, Renear now feels that the standards to make this happen will take years to evolve. Creating successful electronic standards, he concluded, involves a delicate balance between promoting innovation versus promoting interoperability; and creating this balance requires political engagement, social skills, restraint, and luck.
Following the keynote address was a day of nine presentations on various aspects of e-commerce, from the starkly practical to the highly theoretical. One of the most engaging was a talk by Steve Downie, an assistant professor at the UI/UC GSLIS, titled “Online Music: The MP3 Phenomenon.” The MP3 standard for audio files, designed to be the auditory component of the HDTV specification, was formally adopted by the International Standards Organization in 1995. Because it was so effective at compressing sound files, it took on a life of its own and soon become wildly popular. Sales of MP3 players are expected to top 32 million in 2003. One of the interesting facts about the MP3 standard, and one that has the record industry up in arms, is that it has no mechanism for encryption. Downie believes that neither MP3 nor its Napster-like derivatives will go away, and that a collision is developing between access and e-commerce with regard to recorded music.