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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 2002

Technology Observations from the Big Easy

This year’s ALA Midwinter exhibits in New Orleans were a lot like the city they were held in: laid back, mixing the new with the old, and showing lots of skin.

Instead of starting the exhibits on Saturday morning, the conference exhibit planners cut the opening ribbon at 5:30 Friday night, giving conference-goers two hours to sample vendors’ wares and at the same time munch on sandwiches, drinks, and dessert (pralines, of course!) provided in strategic exhibit hall locations. Some publishers even scheduled author signings for this time, and they were jammed with autograph-seekers. But most of the exhibit- goers used this time to assess what the show had to offer and where they would make their follow-up visits on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It was an enjoyable way for librarians and exhibitors to greet each other.

Although there were fewer booths and vendors than I am used to seeing at Midwinter, there were still plenty of new products and services to discover and learn about. One persistent theme that ran through much of what I saw was linking, both human and technical. The sense of vendor-to-vendor networking was almost palpable, and alliances were in evidence everywhere: ISI with Biological Abstracts; OCLC with the American Book Exchange, Ingram, and others; Gale with Ingenta; Gaylord—and every other ILS vendor—with Syndetic Solutions; Baker and Taylor with Ingram’s Lightning Source; R. R. Bowker with Elsevier. . . . the list could go on for pages. Collaboration and competition are marching hand-in-hand as every content and software vendor tries to be an important link in the increasingly connected world of e-resources.

The impetus for vendors to integrate their offerings with their competitors comes from the desire of libraries to offer single-source information shopping. And a key technology behind a single-source interface, or “portal” as current jargon will have it, is the OpenURL standard. All the major ILS vendors and content providers at the exhibits were touting support for the OpenURL protocol. And unlike ANSI Standard Z39.50, which is an elaborate and complex standard that has been only partially implemented by the vendor community, the OpenURL standard seems to be much simpler and easier for both source-software developers and target-content providers to implement more fully.

Some vendors developing front-end broadcast searching capabilities are augmenting implementation of Z39.50 with proprietary software, even just to search bibliographic databases, because no ILS vendor or database content provider has implemented the full functionality of its native interface within the protocols and guidelines of Z39.50. Doing so would take more programming resources than the ILS vendors seem willing to commit to the effort. But the vendors so far seem to find the OpenURL standard adequate for linking citations to content without resorting to proprietary solutions. Let’s hope that linking standards and vendor linking implementations are able to stay in better sync than searching standards and vendor searching implementations, which have so far eluded synchronization.

Another piece of the unified front end for information discovery to delivery (D2D) is easy access by journal titles to the periodical content purchased or leased by a library through multiple aggregators. Serials Solutions has taken an early lead in this market with over 400 customers. The company’s focus is on providing a union list of titles. A sales rep said it will soon be offering MARC records for serial titles. Annual pricing for the basic service starts at $900, going up to $3,150, and is based on the number of full-text “journal holdings” (is this phrase even relevant any more?) and the size and type of library. JournalWebCite, a competitor who was also exhibiting, has about 50 paying customers in addition to 30 libraries taking advantage of its 30-day free trial. It claims its strength is in management reports, which have tripled in number over the last several months. JournalWebCite service starts at $600 and goes up to over $6,000, depending on the level of service and the size and type of library.

At the high end of the new e-serials management systems is TDNet. The company bills itself as “a single source for subscriptions management of print and electronic journals,” and now has 16 library customers, including Western Michigan University and the Library of Congress, for its Reference and Reading Room service. Annual pricing starts at about $5,200.

Can they all get along?

The ILS market has clearly entered a new phase. Most of the software development of ILS vendors is going toward the creation of modular D2D information portals and management services, of which the library catalog and the management control modules are but the most highly developed. All the major ILS vendors are trying to become information systems integrators for their library customers. At the same time, most of them are also trying to market whatever piece of the D2D suite of services appeals to a library. Do you like Epixtech’s Horizon, but want to use Muse Global instead of Web Feat (with which Epixtech is allied)? No problem. Prefer Endeavor’s Voyager but Ex Libris’ MetaLib? No problem. Want to keep your VTLS Virtua system, but like Sirsi’s iBistro? Again, no problem. The age of the modular mix and match is upon us.

To aid ILS vendors in their goal to become your library’s systems integrator are Muse Global and Web Feat, both of which provide software tools for building information portals. Web Feat, which did not have a booth at the exhibits, is concentrating on making deals with ILS vendors to serve as the engine behind the front-end interface. Muse Global, on the other hand, is eagerly trying to both work with libraries directly and with ILS vendors as the software behind the scenes.

Fretwell-Downing is emerging in this environment as the market leader among non-ILS vendors in marketing systems integration solutions to libraries. For consortia that want one vendor to handle the entire D2D process, F-D has been a popular choice this year. Auto-Graphics is also trying to be a major player in this market, but experienced a setback when its purchase of Wings ILL software from Pigasus Software fell through last fall. From the way that Divine, who recently acquired RoweCom, is positioning itself, I get the impression that it will also be making an effort to be a player in this market arena in the near future.

But the vendor to watch in this, as in a number of other library markets, is OCLC. During the past year OCLC has added major functionality to its FirstSearch Service at a dizzying pace, and intends, I am told, no near-term slowdown. Judging by the current pace of development, it won’t be long before Steve Coffman’s idea of “Building Earth’s Largest Library” (Searcher, March 1999) will move from the idea stage to a work-in-progress.

I suspect that in the coming years OCLC’s 9,300 member libraries will increasingly consider making WorldCat via FirstSearch their default library catalog. And with regard to periodical literature and other digital information, OCLC aggregates more content than any other vendor in the library marketplace. Given its 45-million-title bibliographic database, its ILL tools, as well as the citation and full-text journal and reference information content it provides, the company will be a major player in the ongoing effort to develop D2D information services.

A vendor whose product was featured all over the exhibit hall did not even have a booth of its own—Syndetic Solutions. Almost every ILS vendor of note, as well as OCLC, was featuring enhanced bibliographic content supplied by the company, such as book jackets and tables of contents.

Slip us some skins

The latest buzzword at the 2002 Midwinter exhibits was “skins,” or “skin technology.” If the software functionality and information content from remote servers are thought of as the muscle and bones of a user interface, how that functionality and content are presented can be thought of as the skin within which the muscles of functionality and the bones of content are wrapped. Skins control the font and layout of the content, what graphics and descriptions accompany it, and even whether pieces of the functionality are enabled or pieces of the content are displayed.

The technology behind skins is style sheets applied to the information being sent from the remote server. The skin technology of some vendors’ front ends, Epixtech’s iPAC for example, uses XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), which is used with XML (Extensible Markup Language) encoded content. Other vendors’ front ends, VTLS’s Chameleon iPortal for example, use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is designed to work with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) encoded information. While many vendors still work primarily with HTML encoding in their Web-based products, there is a clear trend to embrace XML. No doubt we will be seeing a lot more skin at this summer’s ALA Annual Conference exhibits as the ILS portal wars continue to heat up.

So many e-books, so few readers

The big trend with regard to e-books I noticed at the exhibits is that book publishers are increasingly allowing their print-book content to become part of e-content aggregations. Ebrary introduced a base collection of 5,000 titles in PDF format—including every Octavo title—with 25,000 additional titles in the production pipeline or under contract. The company is charging public libraries an annual rate of $0.05 per capita of the population served and academic libraries an annual rate of $1 per student and faculty FTE for access to the collection along with the company’s ebrarian 2.0 suite of services. The minimum annual fee is $2,000 per library.

Paratext has launched a new service called Reference Universe that consists of the combined indexes of over 600 library reference titles (and growing fast, they told me) that can be searched as a single database. Searching for index terms, users retrieve citations that give the source, date of publication, publisher, editors, page numbers, and links to the library’s catalog via ISBN for titles held by the library. Some products are hard to explain. Not this one, says Paratext President Eric Calaluca, “Everybody gets this immediately.” The price ranges from $500 to $3,000 annually, depending on the type and size of the library, and on whether the service includes links to titles in the library’s catalog.

Another product that everyone will get is Xreferplus, a service that searches the full text of about 100 reference titles from publishers such as Macmillan, Oxford University Press, and Penguin, and links the content across publications. While the parent company, Xrefer, did not have a booth in New Orleans, I chanced upon the company’s marketing director, Daryl Rayner, in the exhibit hall. She tells me the company will have a booth at the upcoming ALA Annual Conference. In the meantime, the technology can be sampled, and the xreferplus service can be subscribed to.

The History E-Book Project of the American Council of Learned Societies had a booth where reps were talking up the service the project hopes to put into general release this spring. Funded by the Mellon and Delmas Foundations, the E-Book Project currently has the full text of 40 history books on the Web at a demo site. The plan is to have 500 books on a redesigned site when the product is released for sale in the summer.

What was noticeably absent from the exhibits was an e-book reading device. NetLibrary even announced that it would be discontinuing its downloadable software reader because it found that most of its users were quite happy to stick with its browser interface. Judging by its lack of presence at the exhibits, the portable e-book reading device is a technology whose time has not yet come.

Books on disc

The books-on-tape market is in the middle of a transition from tape cassettes to CDs. As one vendor put it, “As the automobile industry goes, so goes the reading book industry.” New cars come with CD players, but there are enough older cars on the road to keep overall cassette sales just about even with CD sales for the moment. There appears to be no consistent pricing relationship between the two formats; it all depends on the title. At present, one CD holds slightly less reading time than a cassette, but that will change when MP3-formatted CDs become common: they store about 10 times as much data as a standard CD. However, there are relatively few MP3 players in cars, and one vendor rep told me that there is a lack of implementation standardization among the brands that are out there. “For example,” she said, “different MP3 players do different things with the pause function.”

What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) market has been an interesting one to observe these past two years. 3M is trying to parlay its dominance of the existing library-security market into a dominance of this newly emerging inventory/security technology. Checkpoint hopes to employ this new technology to wrest market control from 3M. The potential market is enormous because RFID tags are clearly far more useful and labor-saving than library barcodes. But the stubborn fact that RFID tags hover around $0.65 to $0.75 each, versus about $0.02 for barcode tags, has prevented this market from really taking off. From what I am seeing, it will take the development of a mass market in plastic semiconductor technology to significantly lower the price of RFID tags. I look for this to happen about 2005.

In the meantime, VTLS has entered the RFID market by forming an alliance with Tagsys, an international supplier of RFID systems. They have made sales to four libraries as of late January. Any library whose ILS vendor uses the Standard Interface Protocol (SIP) for circulation transactions can implement the VTLS RFID technology.

In addition to the high cost of tagging collections, the lack of standardization in the RFID market is another big stumbling block to its growth. While there are enough early adopters of this technology to spark fierce competition, it is unlikely that large numbers of libraries will abandon their investment in barcodes until standards are in place that would allow a library to switch RFID equipment vendors without facing the prospect of retagging its entire collection. Caveat emptor.

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