Technically Speaking

By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org

Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.

Column for March 2000

Midwinter Exhibits:
Taking an Early Look

This year some of the vendors at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting couldn’t wait for the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday morning to hawk their wares. As I groggily made my way from the bed to the bathroom in my hotel early that morning, I noticed that a couple of colorful papers had been slipped under the door. One was a folded flyer urging me to join SilverPlatter at its booth and at the various events it was sponsoring during the conference. The other was a postcard-sized offering from Murl.com explaining how my library can offer patrons free and secure Web-based e-mail, bookmarks, calendars, and other personally maintained information.

I later found out that Murl.com, a first-time ALA exhibitor, was founded in 1998 and is being marketed to libraries, universities, schools, and professionals as a way of giving people their own personal information management space on the Internet in exchange for being exposed to ads. But when I saw the card, my first thought was that, just like the Net, the exhibits are spilling over their traditional boundaries. This thought was confirmed when I was met with a handout from Gaylord as I was entering the San Antonio Convention Center. I never did manage to find the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

ILS system design trends

As the new generation of integrated library systems matures, the design similarities and differences among the vendors are becoming more apparent. One clear trend is a focus on a browser interface for PAC searching. While most systems offer both a Windows-based GUI searching interface and a browser interface for public access, most of the vendors tell me that their browser interface is more popular with customers. Along with the trend to a browser-based PAC interface comes the use of Java, which clearly adds both flexibility and functionality in comparison to just a plain browser interface.

A major fault line is appearing between those vendors who have committed to Windows-based clients for staff functions and those who have committed to a platform-independent mix of a browser with Java applets for access to all system functionality, not just PAC searching. At this time there are only two vendors—Innovative Interfaces and BestSeller—that have committed to offering all functionality from a browser interface, but Innovative’s success with this design choice has not gone unnoticed by other vendors, so there may be others who are looking to emulate them.

Among the vendors who are sticking to Windows clients for staff functionality, clear differences are emerging in how the staff functions are presented to the user. Some vendors, like DRA, Carl, ExLibris, and Geac, are developing separate Windows clients for all the traditional staff modules (acquisitions, cataloging, circulation). Others, including Epixtech, Gaylord, Sirsi, and VTLS, are making all staff functions (or all except administrative) available from one Windows client.

Diving down a little deeper into interface design choices, we find that, of the systems that present all staff functions from one Windows interface, some (like Gaylord’s Polaris) divide their pull-down menus into the traditional ILS modules, while others (like Sirsi) have chosen to present functional choices (such as adding a bibliographic record or checking out a book) without reference to such traditional organizational categories as cataloging and circulation.

At least one vendor’s Windows-based interface I checked out did not correspond to the neat categories outlined above. TLC’s Library.Solution has neither a separate Windows client for each module nor one Windows client within which the user can access any staff function. Instead TLC has about 17 Windows executables that represent overlapping functional groups but do not necessarily correspond to the traditional module categories.

Searching for excellence

Searching bibliographic data is still the core functionality of a library system. And trying to compare how the various systems provide this key service can be both fascinating and confusing: fascinating because of the exciting new kinds of display interfaces and post-search processing that the newest generation of systems offer; and confusing because there are so few standards or “best practices” against which to evaluate the unique mix of functions and interface choices offered by each vendor.

One noticeable trend is that some vendors (EOSi comes to mind, but there are others as well) are beginning to preprocess user searches by matching them against internal dictionaries and other semantic databases. This neat trick allows them to offer such things as “root word” searching, in which the system automatically constructs a search for all variations of a root word regardless of the variation input by the user, and “sound like” searching, in which the system substitutes its best guesses for misspelled words. For example, if a user searched for “bekuz its enuf,” the search client would turn the phrase into “because it’s enough” before sending it on to the server).

But this increasing functionality has its dark side as well. Because there are no standards for how various searching functions should be presented to the user, searches that appear the same behave very differently. For example, some vendors have designed their PAC searches so that they default to an implied “and” Boolean when two or more keyword terms are inputted, while other systems default to an implied “or” Boolean under the same circumstances. And then there’s OCLC’s recently announced WebExpress, an out-of-the-box version of the WebZ component of SiteSearch, which is planning on letting the library select either default. Whatever happened to the Common Command Language standard, anyway?

ILL market trends

The interlibrary loan marketplace continues to change rapidly. Epixtech is now selling CPS Systems’ Universal Resource Sharing Application (URSA) software, and Endeavor has inked a deal with Clio Software to integrate its ILL-management system into Voyager. Fretwell Downing Informatics, which has done well in Great Britain with its high-end ($25,000 and up, if not discounted) VDX ILL management software, was at the exhibits making a big push for the North American market. They have been responding to bids in North America for about a year now and have already landed some customers, including the Southeastern New York Library Resources Council in Highland, New York.

Technology trends

Looking under the hood of the products of two of the leading ILL vendors, Pigasus and Clio, you will find ColdFusion—not the discredited process that was supposedly going to provide the world with cheap nuclear-fusion energy, but a Web-server software development tool from Allaire that provides a quick way to build Web browser/server-based software products. The ILL vendors, being young and nimble, seem to pick up on the latest application development tools more quickly than the older and larger ILS vendors, who must contend with years of legacy code.

Epixtech has developed a marketing strategy out of claiming they are the first to do it, TLC claims to already be doing it, and Sirsi is thinking about doing it. What is it? Being an ASP—an application service provider. Roughly, that means the vendor hosts the system at one of its own sites and provides the customer with a secure broadband connection to the system. In e-commerce parlance, the vendor provides “a total service solution,” so the customer does not need to buy any hardware or software.

ASP is one of the major mojo buzzwords in the language of e-commerce these days, so we’re sure to hear more about this trend in the library marketplace. As bandwidth gets cheaper and more reliable, what difference does it matter where the hardware resides? And down the road a piece, I expect we will even see library management software that is truly multiuser, so a vendor could support multiple libraries on one system, regardless of whether those libraries have any relationship with each other. The ILS as product could morph into the ILS as service.

A number of ILS vendors are developing the ability to import and export Dublin Core records in XML/RDF. When the library community agrees on a way to map AACR2 records from the MARC format to XML/RDF, it won’t be long after those overdue standards are articulated before all the major ILS vendors will export and import AACR2 records in an XML/RDF-based schema.

The merging continues

Even without the failed merger of Wolters Kluwer and Reed Elsevier, which did not pass regulatory muster, I would guess that subsidiaries of Reed Elsevier took up about 10% of the exhibit real estate in San Antonio: Bowker, Lexis/Nexis, CIS, Marquis Who’s Who, Martindale Hubbell, and G.K. Bauer are just some of them. Who can keep track of who belongs to whom these days? At least there are efforts like the Association of Research Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) to promote price competition in journal publications by supporting the startup of low-cost scholarly journals.

Blackwell and Swets are in the process of merging their subscription services. The deal will be complete when it is given a final okay by the British Office of Fair Trade. And RoweCom, which just recently purchased Faxon, has renamed itself Faxon/RoweCom.

Sagebrush Corporation, which markets the Athena library automation system, has just acquired Winnebago, raising uncertainty among customers about their future direction. In the short run, Sagebrush will continue to market both products, but in the long run it will need to decide which product will get its major development efforts.

Quick takes

Some ILS vendors are responding to the need of consortia to delegate administrative and security privileges. Epixtech is designing its new Sunrise system to allow the system administrator to delegate certain administrative tasks to subadministrators, and Gaylord’s Polaris already has this functionality.

CASPR is promoting its FreeMARC access to MARC records from the Library of Congress, but anyone can now download MARC records freely and easily from LC’s new online catalog.

All the major information aggregators are now implementing the capability to link directly from citations within articles to the abstract and/or full text of what is cited. Ovid, SilverPlatter, Ebsco, and others all provide this feature, but only for articles contained in their own databases.

Britannica had to spend most of its exhibit time explaining how its free online encyclopedia product differs from its online subscription product. The sales people say that about 85% of their institutional customers are sticking with the fee-based service. However, they expect most of the higher-education accounts to switch to the free service because the auxiliary services offered as part of the fee-based service don’t appeal to that market. While Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta report that individuals are still buying the CD-ROM versions of their products for home use, World Book is reporting that its online sales are far surpassing CD-ROM sales in all markets.

ERes, the electronic reserves system from Docutek Information Systems, is growing in functionality beyond simply providing a reserves-management program. It supports communication features such as Internet newsgroups, chat rooms, and bulletin boards, and it can create and administer online surveys. It also has an Internet module that allows instructors and librarians to compile and maintain useful Web resources.

Baker and Taylor’s Replica Books service offering print-on-demand books now has 377 titles, with more than 3,000 titles expected by the end of the year.

Ovid is now offering full-text access to textbooks, mostly in the field of medicine. Thirteen titles were available in late January, with another dozen promised before year’s end.

Project Muse, which began by providing full-text access to Johns Hopkins University Press journals online, is now expanding to offer access to arts and humanities journals from other publishers as well. Muse will include 113 titles by the end of the year and will offer more journals in 2001.

E-book distributor NetLibrary had a large presence in the exhibit hall: The company continues to expand the list of its publisher partners and library customers. As for agreements with ILS vendors to integrate circulation management of NetLibrary e-books into existing library-management systems, a sales rep told me they were “not going there.”