Exhibitors in Toronto reported surprisingly good traffic, despite lower-than-usual attendance.

Julia Kurniewicz of the Toronto Public Library exits the library’s bookmobile on the exhibit floor. 

 
Shine Trabucco, 6, daughter of Denise Trabucco of San Antonio PL, sports a paper hat made for her by Myron Uhlberg, author of The Printer, in the Peachtree Publishers booth.

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 August 2003

Exhibitors Uniting in Their Desire
to Provide Federated Searching

The hot new phrase at this year’s ALA Annual Conference exhibits was “federated searching.” The use of the phrase came out of the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Using the protocol, a single server “harvests” metadata records from multiple remote federated databases. The resulting centralized metadata file is in turn searchable by researchers. But the phrase was quickly expanded to refer to any defined set of multiple remote resources that are searched simultaneously, regardless of whether their metadata records are harvested and put into a single server, or left in the remote databases and targeted by clients doing distributed searching. Vendors who used the term in Toronto were almost exclusively referring to distributed searching (also called broadcast searching) of multiple remote databases by Z39.50 and native interfaces.

Kate Noerr, CEO of MuseGlobal, which produces MuseSearch and a whole family of Muse products aimed at the resource retrieval integration market, believes that federated searching itself is becoming a commodity item with little differentiation among vendor offerings because the technology is fairly straightforward and is being widely adopted. One of the associated services that is not so straightforward, she asserts, is maintaining the links and updating the searching software to reflect changes in search interfaces and functionality in the thousands of information servers that a vendor of federated search services must link to.

Another area of federated search services in which vendors can distinguish themselves, she adds, is post-retrieval processing. I got the sense that all the vendors of federated search services agree that some aspects of post-retrieval processing, such as deleting duplicate results, or “deduplicating,” and sorting results in multiple ways, are tough nuts to crack. WebFeat, which markets a federated search engine and supporting technologies, does not even try to deduplicate results or to sort in multiple ways across databases of origin.

Putting ZING into Searching

The increasing prominence of federated searching technology is also influencing the development of new library catalog search tools. Dynix is hitching its technology wagon to one of the new Z39.50 International: Next Generation (ZING) protocols. Search/Retrieve Web (SRW) service, one aspect of the ZING suite of protocols, marries Z39.50 semantics with the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to create a web service that can utilize many of the new web service standards such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), clients such as Microsoft’s .Net, and tools such as Javascript. “It blows away all the other search technologies we have investigated,” says Jim Wilson, one of the founders of Dynix, who is back with the company as senior library advisor, primarily to enhance Dynix’s standing with academic libraries through the adoption of the latest technologies.

The company has also decided to implement SRW natively in its Horizon system. This is a decision that could have a positive impact on searching standardization. For years, the semantics of the Z39.50 search and retrieve protocol have been a potential, but almost unutilized, tool for standardizing catalog searching among all Library Management Systems. At present, VTLS’s Virtua is the only LMS that utilizes Z39.50 search functionality natively. By deciding to combine the Z39.50 semantics and XML markup, Dynix is taking a giant leap into search standardization. Like the VTLS decision a few years ago, this move by Dynix represents a challenge to the entire LMS market. Let’s hope the other vendors rise to the occasion.

In casting around for the best search engine to implement the Search/Retrieve Web Service, Dynix is evaluating Lucene (or Jakarta Lucene, as it is also known), an open source “high-performance, full-featured text search engine written entirely in Java,” according to its developers. They go on to describe it as “a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.” Jakarta Lucene is one of the many projects of the Apache Software Foundation, a worldwide affiliation of open source software developers. That at least one LMS vendor is seriously considering adopting an open source solution for one of its fundamental technology products is one indication that open source software is increasingly finding its way into library applications.

The adoption of open source software tools by commercial library application vendors in the coming years will benefit both libraries and vendors by lowering the cost of development, increasing standardization of mature software technology, and freeing up resources for proprietary software innovation. All this will help ameliorate the effects of what has been the primary handicap of the LMS market: lack of development dollars available due to the relatively small revenue streams the library software market can sustain. The increasing role of open source software in commercial LMS products will also foster software development collaboration between the library community and the vendor community and promote open source initiatives by cooperative library programming efforts. I think we are at the beginning of a golden age of library-based information-technology development, fueled by the increasing use of open source software.

But I digress. Back to the exhibitors in Toronto.

New Exhibitors

Even though there were far fewer exhibitors than usual for an ALA Annual Conference, this was the first conference for a number of diverse information-technology vendors. ViewletBuilder4, a product from Qarbon, creates interactive demos and tutorials of computer-based applications and activities that would certainly aid anyone teaching a computer-based activity. I could see myself using a product like this to wonderful effect. Checking out the websites of Qarbon and its competitors opened up a whole new world for me of computer instruction aids I never knew existed. In addition to ViewletBuilder, there are  RoboDemo and Camtasia Studio.

ViewletBuilder4 costs $400 for libraries for the fully featured version, and $100 for the noninteractive version. The company has over 20 university users and hundreds of businesses and is now making a push in the library market. A free trial version can be downloaded from the company’s website.

Perhaps the most unusual and interesting company in the Toronto exhibits was Digital Divide Data, another first-time exhibitor. DDD is a nonprofit data markup and conversion company that strives for both high quality and social justice. The company hires primarily Cambodians who are handicapped or victims of war to do the conversion work, all of whom receive extensive training.

Starting with 20 operators in Phnom Penh in 2001, the company now employs over 100 workers and has just received enough funding from the Open Society Institute to double that number. The firm has done conversion projects for Harvard, Tufts, Georgetown, and the University of Chicago. Go to the DDD website and read some of the remarkable stories these operators tell in their own words.

A Canadian Answer to Network Management Woes

It’s a PC . . . no, it’s a thin client . . . no, it’s . . . it’s 1-Box Technology. I am not sure there is a standard name yet for what this multistation arrangement is. The folks at UserFul out of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, which was another first-time ALA exhibitor in Toronto, call it 1-Box Technology, but that does not really describe what this product is or what it does. UserFul has developed extensions to the Linux operating system that enable a PC running this modified Linux to connect up to 10 monitors so that each user has the experience of being connected to a standalone computer.

Centralized administrative control, hacker- and virus-proof security, multilingual interfaces, customizable Internet filtering, and usage statistics are some of the advantages touted in the UserFul brochure. And the PC comes loaded with Open Office, Mozilla, and a host of additional software accessories. I was told the cost is about $500 per station. UserFul provides the PC hub unit, keyboards with built-in USB ports, and mice. The PCs can in turn be connected via the Internet or Ethernet.

So what’s the drawback? Well, the drawback is that Linux does not support a lot of the client software that libraries want to have on their public-access and staff workstations. The company deals with this problem by noting that a UserFul PC running Linux supports all the major thin-client protocols, such as Citrix’s Winframe/ICA, Microsoft’s RDP, Tarantella, or Graphon’s Winbridge. Or libraries could install WINE, an open source compatibility layer that allows some Windows applications to be installed and run natively under Linux.

“Simply connect the stations, Internet, and power, and turn it on,” I was told. “No network setup or technical staff are required. Any connected printers and scanners are automatically available at all stations.” In addition to marketing 1-Box Technology to schools and libraries under the moniker of DiscoverStation, UserFul is also selling the technology to hospitals, hotels, and—this has got to be a natural—exhibitors at conferences, conventions, and trade shows. The specialized product for the trade show market has been named the 1-Box Café.

If you think UserFul is a bad pun, wait till you hear about the next first-time exhibitor I want to mention: Blackbaud. Really. Its featured product for libraries is The Raiser’s Edge, a fundraising and donor-relationship management package that is used by public and private libraries from Boston to Seattle. The firm also offers accounting software for nonprofits, educational administration software, and computer-based training. The company handed out a demo CD that used its computer-based training software to introduce its other products.

Short Takes

Are you aware of JPEG2000, the new state-of-the-art wavelet method for image compression that lets you store one file in a layered format while allowing users multiple views, from thumbnail sketches to high-resolution closeups? Aware wants you to be. The company was featuring a suite of development tools enabling digital-archive vendors and libraries with application-development staff to use the JPEG2000 file format for digital archiving. The Library of Congress, VTLS, and Princeton are among its customers.

Serials Solutions, the leading vendor of custom journal-title lists that link titles to the full text of articles the library has subscribed to through journal aggregators, also now offers OpenURL linking and federated search services. And just as Serial Solutions expands its services to more fully meet the discovery-to-delivery needs of its users, EBSCO has decided to compete with Serials Solutions’ flagship service, its A-to-Z Title List. EBSCO is even calling its service the A-to-Z List Service.

Syndetic Solutions, which has not exhibited at ALA for the past few years, decided to have a presence in Toronto. In addition to offering tables of contents for more than 430,000 titles, cover images for over 850,000 books, book reviews to the tune of 450,000, and in excess of 660,000 summaries and annotations for fiction and nonfiction, the company is now including 30,000 video and DVD covers as a separate service. In addition, Syndetics tracks over 3,500 series and lists the intended reading order of individual titles, offers more than 20,000 first chapters and excerpts, and makes available over 110,000 biographical author notes. So when do we get reader comments?