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 December 2001

Proliferating Portals

My dictionary defines portal as “a passage for gaining entrance; door, esp. one that is grand and imposing.” Who can resist such a marketable metaphor for selling information discovery and retrieval systems? Not the computer industry and certainly not library vendors.

Despite the widespread use of the word by vendors, there is no common understanding about what functionality portals have or should have. The fact that the term is thrown around with abandon makes it difficult for libraries to evaluate and compare one vendor’s portal services with another’s. The following is a list of portal functions and services that I have seen offered by library vendors:

• Alerting service for new information
• Authentication services
• Broadcast searching across multiple databases
• Bundled services from third-party information providers
• Content creation and metadata tool kits
• Customizable user interface
• Filters to prevet access to specified Internet sites and services
• Hosting services
• Information map of services included within the portal
• Interactive reference services
• Linking from citations to full-text across databases
• Request management/ILL
• Rights-management services
• Security functionality
• Session management
• Support of Internet protocols such as FTP, e-mail, chat rooms, and newsgroups
• Support of library and information retrieval standards
• Use statistics
• User-maintained database of bibliographies, citations, links, and free text
• Templates for creation of forms, calendars, and other library information

Looking at this list makes it clear just how far library vendors have traveled from the acq/cat/circ/pac model of the integrated library system—and how far libraries have traveled down the road of outsourcing their basic library functions.

VTLS joined the growing list of ILS vendors with portal products by announcing Chameleon iPortal, “an aggregate Web service for libraries that casts a wide net for capturing information via multiple Internet channels and search engines.”

RemAcc Software Technologies, a software developer based in Columbus, Ohio, announced the release of Library Portal, “an Internet and intranet-based software product for public and academic libraries” designed to manage access to electronic resources.

Amazon Eases Book Buying

Amazon.com recently added a Corporate Accounts Program to its buying options, allowing institutions to set up a billing account as an alternative to paying by credit card with each purchase. Whoever creates the corporate account becomes the primary account-holder, and that person can either do all the ordering himself or authorize other people to purchase books under the account. The account holder can also assign account management responsibilities to additional people.

The company provides monthly bills and statements with item-level detail, and the order history is also available for viewing online. To make the service more personable, each corporate account is assigned a dedicated account representative.

In addition to improved account management, Amazon has also made evaluation easier for some of its books by making selected parts of a book viewable without having to buy it. The table of contents, the back cover, and excerpts from the body of the work can all be viewed prior to purchase.

NetLibrary on the Ropes

NetLibrary announced that it was reducing the salaries of all 230 employees to a uniform $360 per week and, as of press time for this column, was looking for a buyer. The e-book vendor has almost run out of cash and has been unable to find additional investors. It is clear that the original investors will lose most of the $110 million they put into the company. It is also clear the company’s business model of selling perpetual access, which involves perpetual cost, for a one-time fee is not sustainable in the long run and will have to be abandoned by the eventual buyer.

What is less clear is whether that eventual buyer will opt for the Questia model of an annual access fee, the ebrary model of a per-use charge, or some variation of them that will ensure a continued revenue stream. In the meantime, Jay Jordan, the CEO of OCLC, has stated that OCLC stands ready to carry out its escrow agreement with netLibrary to make each customer’s title available by CD-ROM under the same conditions of use they now enjoy, if the company goes out of business.

Contracts and Agreements

• Ex Libris—with the University of Delaware Library in Newark, for the Aleph 500 system to replace the library’s Notis system, and for MetaLib and SFX to manage the library’s electronic resources; and with AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals of Wilmington, Delaware, for Aleph 500 systems for the company’s Wilmington and Alderley Park (U.K.) sites, to replace OpenText’s Techlib Plus system at those locations; and with the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany, to upgrade to an Aleph 500 system from an Ex Libris BIS mainframe system.
• EBSCO—with the West Virginia Library Commission in Charleston, for access to EBSCOhost databases in general reference, business, education, science, multicultural issues, health, and other areas by public library patrons throughout West Virginia. In addition, TexShare, a statewide consortium of academic and public libraries administered by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, has made Academic Search Premier and several other EBSCOhost databases available to patrons of academic and public libraries throughout Texas.
• Endeavor Information Systems—with the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, for the Voyager system, ENCompass, Citation Server, Image Server, Interlibrary Loan, and Universal, all to replace the library’s homegrown system; and with the five-college Cal West Library Consortium in Fullerton, California, a current Voyager user, for the Universal Borrowing intra-consortia lending system.
• Epixtech—with the Michigan Library Exchange (MiLE), for URSA, the Universal Resource Sharing Application, to link MiLE’s 160 libraries in a Z39.50-based virtual catalog and to manage their resource sharing.
• Fretwell-Downing—with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for the VDX system to enhance Access Pennsylvania’s ILL functionality among the 2,700 Pennsylvania libraries. Access Pennsylvania is a database project with 40-million holdings and 6-million bibliographic records that is managed by the Health Sciences Libraries Consortium in Philadelphia.
• The Gale Group—with the Library of Virginia in Richmond, for access to InfoTrac OneFile, Expanded Academic, Contemporary Literary Criticism, General Reference Center Gold, Health and Wellness Resource Center, and Business and Company Resource Center by the residents of Virginia through their public libraries.
• MARC Link—with the Edinburgh University Library in Scotland, for converting the catalog of the library from its inception in 1580 through 1984 using the database of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) as the primary resource.
• Sirsi—with the SNC-Lavalin Group, an international engineering and construction company headquartered in Montreal, for the Unicorn Library Management System and iBistro Electronic Library for its Montreal main library, and for branch libraries in Toronto and Calgary, to replace a DataTrek system.

Announcements

• OCLC has enhanced WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog, via its FirstSearch interface by adding icons to represent the physical format of material; by adding tables of contents, cover art, book summaries, and notes about authors to bibliographic records for current popular material; and by adding the ability to search by the language of the material.
• NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, announced that the proposed Digital Talking Book Standard (Z39.86-200x) has been presented for comments and balloting. The proposed standard can be viewed and downloaded from NISO’s Web site.

Acquisitions and Alliances

• Swets Blackwell and ProQuest have formed a marketing alliance under which Swets Blackwell will have exclusive rights to market ProQuest to the corporate market in North America. In the Middle East, Africa, and most of Europe, Swets Blackwell was also given nonexclusive distribution rights to the academic library market in addition to exclusive rights to the corporate market. The two companies also signed a linking agreement under which customers of both will be able to link to the full text of journals provided by Swets Blackwell from the journal citation within ProQuest, when ProQuest itself does not have the full text.