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 April 2002

Statewide Projects Face D2Deficiency

Two new state-level contracts demonstrate how integrated library systems (ILS) or consolidated-catalog vendors come up short with respect to resource-delivery management. Fretwell-Downing was recently selected by the Minnesota Library Information Network (MnLINK) to implement the gateway portion of its statewide virtual library project. The ILS part of MnLINK will be implemented by Ex Libris.

The Wisconsin Division of Libraries, Technology, and Community Learning also selected Fretwell-Downing to implement the gateway and interlibrary loan management aspect of its statewide bibliographic resource, WISCAT. Auto-Graphics won the bid to replace Brodart as the vendor for the consolidated catalog, which, unlike an ILS system, will not contain status information.

Ex Libris and Auto-Graphics are not alone in failing to meet the complete D2D (discovery to delivery) needs of ambitious statewide projects. I have been told by several people who are involved with selecting vendors for such projects that no ILS vendor is up to snuff when it comes to interlibrary loan and other forms of resource delivery management. Rather than develop its own system, Endeavor partnered with Clio Software to integrate Clio, the interlibrary loan (ILL) and document fulfillment management system, into its Voyager system. But at this stage of the game, no ILS vendor can offer a fully functioning, integrated D2D solution in a multitype cooperative environment. This is presenting a market opportunity to Fretwell-Downing, whose VDX ILL management product and Z39.50-based suite of information-discovery tools are among the most well developed in the market. But the company’s ILS system, OLIB7, is no match in the market for the leading ILS vendors.

A vigorous debate seems to be raging within and among many state library agencies over whether it is preferable to create one consolidated statewide catalog, or to rely on a virtual catalog brought into being by broadcast searching of multiple catalogs, the results of which are deduplicated “on the fly” by computer algorithms. The debate is far from over, but if I were a betting man, I would put my money on a consolidated approach, because achieving bibliographic coherence out of the current situation requires more than relying on computer processing and voluntary standards to herd our library cats.

Plugging the Digital Gaps

“It’s like having naked baby pictures of yourself stapled to your forehead when you walk around.” So opined an anonymous e-mail post, as quoted in issue no. 37 of RLG’s ShelfLife, a weekly electronic news summary, commenting on the oldest of the Usenet archives that Google made publically available in mid-December.

These oldest two million posts on Usenet, a bulletin board of thousands of newsgroups that began life in 1981, were saved by a group of hackers and recently given to Google. The archives were added to the 700 million posts that had already been acquired by Google from the efforts of dedicated hackers who did not want to see this early electronic history lost. The retrieval from old tapes of Usenet history was partially underwritten by Brewster Kahle—the developer of the Internet archiving Wayback machine—whose passion for preserving the Web has been unsurpassed and whose dedication to this goal deserves more recognition by the library community.

The Floodgates Have Opened

About a third of the press releases I have been getting in the past couple of months involve linking partnerships. They are coming too thick and too fast to keep track of: Bowker with Infotrieve and Ingenta, EBSCO with Endeavor, the British Library with Elsevier, OCLC with about a half-dozen companies, and on and on. Most involve the OpenURL standard. The speed with which this linking standard is being implemented reminds me of the early days of the Web.

Serials’ Additional Solutions

“A library’s individual e-journal subscriptions have been a challenge to include in their Serials Solutions reports,” said the serials list provider’s founder, Peter McCraken. McCraken has announced an agreement with Harrassowitz to supply Serials Solutions with lists of the e-serial titles that their mutual clients obtain from Harrassowitz, an option that was not previously available.

Contracts and Agreements

• Innovative Interfaces—with the Electronic Information Network (eiNetwork), a collaborative project of the Allegheny County (Pa.) Library Association, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and the Commission on the Future of Libraries in Allegheny County, for the Millennium library-management system in eiNetwork’s 45 public libraries, to replace the organization’s DRA Classic system; also with the Library System of Lancaster County in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for Millennium in the system’s 13 public libraries, to replace Gaylord’s Galaxy software; with the Camden County Library System in Voorhees, New Jersey, for Millennium in the system’s eight branches, to replace a DRA Classic system; with Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia, for a Millennium system to replace the College’s VTLS Classic system; and with the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, a system of 30 technology institutes headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, to expand the Millennium system in the central institute library to include the other 29 institutes, which currently use four separate SIRSI systems.
• Epixtech—with the Vancouver (B.C.) Public Library, for a Horizon Sunrise system for the library’s 21 outlets, to replace Epixtech’s Dynix system.
• Sirsi—with the Richmond Hill Public Library in Ontario, Canada, for a Unicorn library system, along with the Hyperion Digital Media Archive and iBistro Electronic Library, to replace the library’s DRA Classic system; and with the Waterford-Groton Public Libraries, a consortium of three libraries in Waterford, Groton, and Mystic, Connecticut, for the Unicorn library system and iBistro Electronic Library, to replace TLC/Carl’s Library.Solution system. a TLC/Carl-with the Corvallis-Benton County (Oreg.) Public Library for Library.Solution to replace the library’s DRA Classic system.
• Gaylord Information Systems—with the Harrison Regional Library System headquartered in Columbiana, Alabama, for a Polaris library system for Shelby County’s 10 public libraries, to replace a Gaylord Galaxy system.
• Ex Libris—with the University of Koblenz-Landau, a three-campus university in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, for an Aleph 500 system to replace an Ex Libris BIS-LOK system and a Sisis system (a German-based ILS vendor).
• MuseGlobal—with the 83 branch libraries of the New York Public Library, for MuseSearch and MuseBridge. MuseBridge provides a single interface to multiple information resources and MuseSearch manages broadcast searching among those resources. In recognition of the severe budget cuts sustained by NYPL after 9/11, the company offered the library a two-year subscription to these services free of charge.
• VTLS—with the Roanoke (Va.) Higher Education Center, for a Virtua system, the library’s first ILS; also with the Nunavut Public Library Services in Iqaluit, Canada, for a Virtua system to replace a MultiLIS system; with the African Development Bank headquartered in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, for a Virtua system to replace the library’s Texto system; and with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., the Universiti Putra Malaysia in Serdang, Selangor state, Malaysia, and the Universty of New England in Armidale, Australia, all for Virtua systems to replace VTLS Classic systems.

Announcements

• TLC/Carl has announced the formation of a schools division and a new modification of Library.Solution called SchoolLibrary.Solution.
• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) has announced the establishment of a nine-member board of trustees, whose members come from six countries, to help promote and provide leadership for the DCMI.

Acquisitions

• Divine, a company that provides information services to businesses and libraries, and which purchased Faxon RoweCom last year, has announced the additional purchase of Northern Light Technology in an all-stock transaction.
• ProQuest’s Information and Learning unit has announced that it has purchased Micromedia Limited, a publisher of Canadian information and an aggregator of other reference-information distributors, for an undisclosed amount.