Cutting the ribbon to open the exhibits are (from left): Exhibits Round Table Chair Margaret Sullivan, ALA Treasurer Liz Bishoff, ALA President-elect John Berry, ALA President Nancy Kranich, and ALA Executive Board member Ken Haycock.

A fife-and-drum corps performed at the All-Conference Reception in the exhibits hall.

Questia used literary figures like Hester Prynne to tout its full-text online resources.

Ebrary took a low-key approach to publicizing its collection, which is freely accessible to browsers.

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 2001

Games Vendors Play

The exhibits at this year’s ALA Midwinter Meeting were a veritable toy store of new games. The most basic and still the most popular game is, of course, the Information Retrieval Game (also known as the Find It Game). But playing this game has gotten so complex and difficult that vendors are developing numerous specialized variations. Here are some of the ones we found as we roamed the exhibit aisles in Washington.

The E-Book Game

E-books were all over the exhibit hall. NetLibrary had its now-usual presence, and Questia showed the e-book/research support subscription service that it is marketing to individuals. In its booth demonstration, the company positioned itself as the library’s partner. “Be our friends,” they seemed to be saying to libraries. “We are not trying to replace you, but to support you.” Nevertheless, so far Questia is not marketing its e-book access to libraries, but the sales rep acknowledged that indeed nothing really can stop a library from subscribing to the service on behalf of its patrons.

As in previous ALA exhibits, ebrary had a relatively low profile, and was not demonstrating a fully functional product—only making its presence known and talking about its approach. Ebrary’s e-book collection will be freely accessible to all users who just want to look. Copying or cutting-and-pasting will cost you $0.25 for up to a page’s worth of material. The publisher will get 60% of the resulting revenues, ebrary will get 35%, and the library will get 5%. Ebrary will be able to give both libraries and publishers lots of data on both what books and which parts of those books are most heavily used. Disaggregation, here we come.

Perhaps the biggest e-book news at the exhibits was that Baker and Taylor announced its intention to begin selling e-books. It is in the process of lining up publishers and has not yet announced the details of its offerings. The big gorilla, as they say, has just stepped into the ring.

In other e-book goings on, ABC-Clio has made the decision to publish every new title simultaneously as an e-book and a print book, with a goal of making all of its books available in every electronic format. The company’s e-book versions are selling for about one-third more than the price of the printed book.

Tucked off in the back of aisle 300 was a new e-book company and first-time ALA exhibitor, ION Systems. Like Questia, they are selling access by subscription; but unlike Questia, they are marketing through public and school libraries rather than directly to individuals. Called GalaxyLibrary.com, the e-book subscription service has 1,000 books available now; the company expects to increase that number to 25,000 by the end of the year. A subscription costs between $1,200 and $3,600 per year, depending on the size of the library, and provides unlimited access to all books by all authorized patrons. What particularly captured my attention was the ease with which the ION reader software can enlarge or diminish the size of the font. This is a product tailor-made for low-vision people. It works with Jaws and Windows-Eyes, and the company plans on supporting the DAISY (Digital Audio-based Information System) standard by June 2001.

The Integration Game

The library management system (LMS) vendors are continuing their efforts to integrate library catalog access with all other kinds of data, both bibliographic and full text. Sirsi’s iBistro product, a client/server application with browser plug-in software on the client side, is being positioned as the company’s foundation product for integrating content for end users.

LMS vendors are not the only ones playing the Integration Game. One new player is JonesKnowledge.com, which introduced its e-global library product at Midwinter. Designed to support distance users, this customizable service offers information guides and tutorials put together by professional librarians, as well as a library-customizable way to integrate all resources offered by a library into an integrated information space—a map to help patrons get “the lay of the land” as they hike through the various knowledge domains and vendor services paths on their information quest. To the surprise of the staff at the e-global library booth, it was public librarians who showed the most interest in their product.

Integration comes in many flavors, of course, and one interesting new flavor is represented by the WebFeat translation engine (not to be confused with Webfeet, the Internet cataloging service). WebFeat is not a branded interface; in fact, you probably couldn’t tell, as an end user, if you were using it or not, since the library customizes not only the look and feel of the interface, but also the actual wording of the search prompt and even what indexes are used in any given search. WebFeat offers a translation engine that can translate a common set of library-determined searches into the native mode (or Z39.50 mode) of any search the library wants to include in this (potentially) “one search searches all” tool. Other vendors new to the single-search interface game include the Sea Change Corporation through WebClarity, a new browser-based gateway for searching multiple Z39.50 resources, and Fretwell-Downing, through its family of “Z” tools: ZPortal, Z2Web, and Z’mbol.

Maybe next year we will see a product that combines a really good “lay of the land” approach with an effective “one search searches all” approach. Then the next rung to construct on the resource discovery ladder leading to knowledge nirvana will become apparent. But even now it is clear that each library’s individual catalog can no longer be the centerpiece of the library’s efforts to organize the resources it provides to its patrons. It is now just one tool among many, all of which need to be integrated into a coherent system for the information-seeker.

The Linking Game

Closely related to the Integration Game, the Linking Game was being played by all the major aggregators. OVID and SilverPlatter demonstrated how they link citations to their full-text sources if the sources are among the data provided by their systems. And they are all in various stages of implementing the CrossRef standard, which will enable the aggregators to link to full text located at publisher-maintained sites. Ex Libris debuted its MetaLib virtual library service, designed to both integrate resource discovery through multiple database searching, and to link from one database to another using the SFX linking software based on the OpenURL standard.

The Borrowing-and-Lending Game

We encountered high drama and confusion among the ILL vendors and their customers at the Midwinter exhibits. As RLG, Fretwell-Downing, Pigasus, TLC, and Epixtech all retool their ILL software to support peer-to-peer communication through ISO 10161—and while Perkins Associates (the makers of Clio) takes a wait-and-see attitude—there is enormous pressure on OCLC to make its ILL service available to send and receive messages to and from ILL software using ISO 10161-compliant messaging protocols. From June to December of last year, OCLC made a big push to make sure its ILL system was able to exchange messages with the various ILL management systems implementing the ISO 10161 standard.

OCLC then insisted on thoroughly testing ISO interoperability with each library that was using ISO-compliant software before it would allow peer-to-peer communication between an ISO-compliant application and its own ILL system on a production basis. The process was so time-consuming that by Midwinter there were only eight libraries profiled by the OCLC ILL system as ISO users. “We realized we had to find a faster way to meet the needs of our members,” said Collette Mak, manager of OCLC’s Resource Sharing Product Management. “So we have now decided to limit our testing to the exchange of a few basic messages for libraries using software that we have already thoroughly tested for its ability to exchange ISO 10161 messages with OCLC’s system. We hope that by simplifying our procedures we will be able to test five to six libraries per month, which should satisfy current demand. But if demand increases, we are prepared to take additional measures to insure that the demand for testing is met.”

And as if the ILL game were not fast-moving enough, Epixtech changed the rules by announcing plans to offer open-source licensing for its software to implement the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP), which is currently in draft form. This action by Epixtech could pressure LMS vendors to implement the capability of sending and receiving circulation information from other vendors’ systems. If this capability becomes a reality, it’s really going to be tough to figure out where circulation ends and ILL begins.

The Interactive Game

This game consists of supplying online/real-time reference. In addition to LSSI’s product, the Virtual Reference Desk, Docutek Information Systems exhibited the Virtual Reference Librarian, a new real-time reference support system that can be hosted on the library’s network. The Virtual Reference Librarian is bundled in with Eres, the company’s electronic-reserves and document-management product. Stay tuned: This market is going to grow. The need is great and the enabling technology is at hand.

The Customizable Game

There is a momentum among vendors to make their systems customizable, not just by the libraries that use the system, but also by end users. The way has been led by customizable Web portals that the likes of Yahoo offer to Web surfers, and by MyLibrary@NCState—a user-driven, customizable interface to collections of Internet resources, which is downloadable GNU-licensed software written in Perl and designed to be platform-independent. Now some of the LMS vendors are beginning to offer interfaces configurable by individual patrons. Sirsi exhibited a new version of its iBistro software, which it is positioning as a foundation for delivering content—any library content, from databases to book reviews. The software allows end users to enter their own preferences and individual profile information into the system. Sirsi is selling iBistro as an independent product that a library can purchase even if it has another vendor for its library-management system.

The Content-Management Game

In addition to the “old” standbys such as Endeavor’s Encompass, Sirsi’s Hyperion, and OCLC’s SiteSearch, we saw a few new vendors playing the Content-Management Game. The University of Washington’s Content Software Suite for digital asset management has been marketing its product for just over two years, has about 15 customers, and is now on Release 3.0. Stanley Associates, which provides digital library services to corporations and government agencies, was at the exhibits as much to recruit librarians to participate in designing information-management tools as it was to recruit new customers. Ex Libris has announced its intention to also play the Digital Asset Management Game with a suite of software tools it’s calling DigiTooLibrary.

On Multimedia Products . . .

The National Information Center for Education Media (NICEM) had a booth devoted to MediaSleuth. The system searches the 630,000-record NICEM database and can process orders for over 15,000 training and education media products from the various distributors the company deals with. An additional 150,000 hard-to-find titles are on a “call for availability” status. MARC records are offered without charge.

On Conversion Services . . .

These days, when conversion applies not only to getting analog data into digital format, but also to getting digital metadata from one markup scheme to another, there’s plenty of work for firms like PacificData Conversion Corporation. Its booth touted such conversion services as HTML Dublin Core to XML Dublin Core and Folio to XML, as well as its data-entry and OCR services.

On Cataloging the Web . . .

Brodart introduced DartClix, a Web cataloging service that will offer 500 new bib records a month and will be marketed to school and small public libraries not using OCLC. A salesperson at Brodart’s booth told me the major impediment to growing the Web cataloging market is the huge popularity of Internet access: When the Web is available on all public-access terminals, users who just want to search the library’s catalog are often left without access to a workstation. For this reason, in order to preserve catalog access many libraries feel the need to lock down some PAC workstations so they cannot access the Net; however, then they cannot link via the URL in the bib record. We need a phrase to describe this crippling of the catalog in order to preserve access to it. How about “access triage”?

On BiblioMondo . . .

BiblioMondo is the new kid on the LMS block. Formed in December 2000 when Best Seller bought UK-based ALS International, BiblioMondo is a $15-million company that hopes to compete in North America in all sizes and types of libraries. It will continue to market Best Seller to small and medium-sized libraries, and will introduce ALS to large libraries and consortia. ALS’s primary market has been public libraries and library consortia in Europe, where it has over 1,000 library installations. Its flagship LMS product, Concerto, uses the Sybase DBMS on a Windows NT platform.

On RFID Technology . . .

We learned from an honest rep of an RFID-based (Radio Frequency Identification) inventory control system showing her wares at Midwinter that the RFID emperor has no standards clothes: If you buy one company’s RFID tags and equipment, you cannot use those same tags with another company’s RFID-equipment. Imagine not being able to switch LMS vendors without re-barcoding the entire collection. And those RFID tags cost almost $1.00 each. There are standards efforts in the works, though. Once standards are in place and RFID tag costs get cut by about 75%, there will be no stopping a wholesale conversion to this great technology.

On Bioscience Information . . .

Chalk up another victory for the movement begun by SPARC to keep journal costs to academic and research libraries down. This was the ALA debut of BioOne, a nonprofit venture formed a year ago to provide access to the full text of bioscience journals published by scientific societies that have not previously been available in full text. As of January, the database consisted of 31 journal titles, each from a different nonprofit publisher. Trial access is planned beginning in March, and paid subscriptions are expected to be available by April. Amigos is the exclusive marketing agent.

On Moody’s Blues . . .

I am one of those living-in-the-past librarians who still have difficulty identifying Mergent FIS with the venerable name of Moody’s. Mine is a common affliction among librarians that causes the Mergent FIS sales folks no end of frustration, because they have a hard time getting librarians to associate with the name Mergent all those feelings that the name Moody’s conjures up. Same company, they tell me; it just had to give up the name. They also tell me most universities now acquire Moody’s Manuals online, but lots of other libraries still subscribe to CD and even print versions. Some of the reports are just so big they take too much bandwidth to transmit over lower-speed Internet connections.