The top-hatted sales force in the BWI booth kept busy with inquiries about their many collection development services.

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 2003

The Questmaster Emerges at Midwinter

It was a quiet time in the 2003 ALA Midwinter Meeting exhibit hall, where all the vendors are knowledgeable, all the librarians are anxious to buy, and all the technology products are above average. About the only visible excitement could be seen at the BWI booth, where librarians flocked to hear about a set of collection development services for public libraries. Staffed with a regiment of black-suited, top-hatted sales reps and decked out with stunningly attractive brochures, the BWI booth attracted a steady stream of exhibit goers to hear about its many collection development services, including TitleTales, the company’s Web-based database of new titles freely available to anyone who registers at www.bwibooks.com.

But if the exhibit halls were quieter and a bit less crowded than normal, the products I saw indicated no slowdown in the ongoing reinvention of the library management system (LMS).

The public access catalog (PAC) is swiftly being replaced as the public-access front end by what most vendors are calling a “portal.” The word portal, however, does not really do justice to an evolving library Internet service that is becoming much more than a grand entrance into the world of electronic information. Unlike a portal, you don’t leave this service behind after beginning your information quest. The service stays with you, guiding your quest, and orchestrating the use of a growing set of discovery and delivery (D&D) tools that are becoming the workhorses of information seeking in the World Wide Web. By D&D I mean such tools as the Z39.50 protocol, the OpenURL, the OAIMHP, link resolvers, SQL, SOAP, XML, etc. (The list is way too long and getting longer!)

The best services are being designed to alter the information landscape to suit our needs as we roam cyberspace. Their goal is to present us with the most appropriate view of the Internet at each step of our information quest. Maestros of view morphing, handlers of discovery and delivery tools they are, leading us hither and yon until we have just the right view of the information we seek. Questmasters guiding us through cyberspace.

Of course, I realize I am going a bit overboard here. Most development efforts are just in their early stages, but the long-range goal of all the products is the same—to provide a smooth and effective journey from discovery to delivery of information.

These questmasters, as I will call them, are being developed as separate systems from the traditional back-end library management systems. The rise of standard searching and linking protocols is finally enabling vendors to create systems that appear, from the user’s perspective, to search any bibliographic database with as great an ease as any PAC searches its own library catalog. (Of course, the questmaster is not really doing the searching; it is rather accepting the user’s search input, passing it off to one or more local or remote servers that have their own search engines, getting back the results, and presenting those results to the user.) And the rise of standard protocols to pass circulation and patron-related information among disparate systems will soon allow these products to manage circulation transactions, reciprocal borrowing, and interlibrary loans with any vendor’s LMS as well as any PAC manages such transactions with its own circulation system.

BiblioMondo, which has sold primarily to national and public libraries, is hoping to get a foothold in the academic library market with its revamped acquisitions and serials modules and its new family of Zones products that the company is calling Advanced Library Patron Services. Zones was introduced at the ASTED (Association pour l’avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation) Conference in Quebec last November, and the Philadelphia Midwinter exhibit was its American debut. Geared to medium to large libraries and consortia, Zones’s pricing starts at $6,000.

Sirsi, still leading the LMS market in sales, showcased Rooms, its questmaster designate. iBistro and iLink are being repositioned as catalogcentric services, and Rooms will become the coordinating front end for multiple information services. In beta during ALA Midwinter, Rooms is slated to go into general release by the end of March. Like most questmaster products, Rooms is browser-based and uses XML and XSL (extensible stylesheet language) technology. Its look and feel, as well as the information it presents, will be customizable by each library. The product was available for viewing “by invitation only,” but I had no trouble getting an invitation.

Both Zones and the more recent Rooms are but two examples of the type of software that all the major LMS vendors are developing to replace the PAC in those libraries that want to put Internet resources on an equal footing with their own physical holdings.

Dynix, originally Dynix and later Ameritech and Epixtech, came full circle with its recent back-to-the-future name change. Its most recent questmaster-like product, iPAC, was also rechristened: It’s now called Horizon Information Portal 3.0 and will sport a host of functional and administrative enhancements to the current iPAC when it is released in early third quarter 2003. In conjunction with its name change, Dynix also announced the founding of the Dynix Institute, which will sponsor a Web-based seminar series, an annual professional development conference, and an e-newsletter featuring interviews with industry leaders, all of which will be available without charge to the library community.

Innovative, flush from its selection as the vendor of choice to replace San Francisco Public Library’s Sirsi DRA system, showcased the three products in its Millennium Access Plus suite: WebBridge for resource linking, MetaFind for broadcast searching, and Web Access Management for authentication. Libraries can purchase them separately or all together.

Unlike the publicity and exposure that Dynix sought for its new CEO Jack Blount throughout the Midwinter Meeting, the departure of Jane Burke and swift appointment of Roland Dietz to replace her as head of Endeavor seemed relegated to the background at the Endeavor booth and at the firm’s update breakfast. The company stressed continuity and new product development in its questmaster duo, ENCompass and LinkFinderPlus. It also announced seven new Voyager sales at the conference, offsetting a recent lackluster showing in North America, and indicating an aggressive push into the small academic and special library market.

Ex Libris, whose new sales of its flagship Aleph 500 LMS have been solid and steady if not stellar, seems to have hit the marketing jackpot with its own questmaster tools, MetaLib and SFX. The company has sold these tools to over 320 libraries, two-thirds of which are not Aleph customers. In what may be a harbinger for the LMS market as a whole, Ex Libris estimates that about one-third of its revenues are now derived from its e-content management and questmaster tools. The company is also beginning to position itself to sell to mid-range academic libraries by developing workflow training aids in a partnership with e-Glue Software Technologies, but it is still holding back from entering the public library market outside of multitype consortia.

VTLS, which has a fiercely loyal customer base and a strong technology foundation for its Virtua system, is struggling to successfully market its LMS to new customers. The company has clarified its offerings by dividing them into three product lines: VTLS Virtua, its LMS and flagship product; VTLS RFID, its radio frequency tagging system for security and inventory control; and VTLS Imaging, its digital imaging suite of services. The company’s questmaster, Chameleon iPortal, functions as an integral part of Virtua, but is also being independently marketed. With the ability to allow a library to custom configure almost every aspect of its look and feel as well as its content, Chameleon iPortal represents where the market is headed with building in flexibility to questmasters.

A message from the writer

Time out for a commercial. As many of my readers know, I am a champion of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (hey, I saw those eyes glaze over—stay with me here), and Virtua is the only LMS product that currently supports this important improvement to our online catalogs. Believing that a demonstration is more effective than talk, VTLS is putting LC’s collection of music records online to demonstrate the look and feel of a catalog organized under FRBR principles. It should be up and running by the end of March. Check it out, and if you like what you see, bug your LMS vendor to implement FRBR. End of commercial.

TLC, third behind Sirsi and Innovative in the overall number of new LMS sales in 2002, was the sales leader in the small- to medium- sized public library market. The company debuted the Online Selection Assistant, an extension of its YouSeeMore questmaster product that illustrates the potential and flexibility of this new product category. Billed as a vendor-neutral and LMS-neutral one-stop shop for Web-based selection and acquisition of library materials, this product aggregates all possible acquisitions and selection-related content, as well as all needed publisher and jobber interfaces, into one unified service.

Gaylord’s Polaris system, which has obtained a toehold in the standalone and consortial public library market, calls its questmaster PowerPAC. While lacking some of the linking tools that vendors in the academic library market cannot be competitive without, it features integration with LSSI’s virtual reference service and with Ebsco’s NoveList. PowerPAC 3.0, due out in the second quarter of 2003, will have patron authentication services and Unicode support for Arabic, Hebrew, and CJK.

One LMS vendor that has had great success marketing its questmaster suite of products to libraries that use other LMS systems is Fretwell-Downing. In fact, the company has not even tried to market its library management system, OLIB7, in North America, instead concentrating all its efforts on its suite of questmaster services—Zportal, OL2, VDX, and Cportal—primarily to large consortia. The newest product in the suite, Cportal, is designed to search all local I&R information from a single user interface. It will likely get its tires kicked in the coming months by state agencies and consortia that are thinking of tackling the challenge of giving citizens a single interface to community information.

Third party candidates

MuseGlobal and WebFeat were both represented at the exhibits. They each continue to serve as third-party questmaster tools used by the LMS vendors’ products, as well as agents marketing their own discovery and presentation software directly to libraries. Each company offers a suite of six tools to aid in the discovery, presentation, management, and delivery of information services. They compete with the LMS vendors and partner with them as well.

The emergence of questmaster services is widening the already substantial gap between the big library systems that descended from the minicomputer platform, and the small library systems that were initially developed to run on a single microcomputer. The Companion Corporation, which markets the Alexandria LMS, and the Sagebrush Corporation, which markets a version of Sirsi’s Unicorn system for schools as well as Athena and Spectrum (formerly Winnebago), have questmaster products in the planning stages for release later in the year. Some of the small systems did not appear to even have these new information discovery tools on their radar screens.

Breaking the mold

Then there is CASPR, a company on a mission to reinvent the LMS. From what I was shown at the exhibits, it is likely that the company’s next release will definitely break the mold—not just evolve it as the rest of the LMS industry is doing. Based on experience with the LibraryCom service, the entirely Web-based LMS that CASPR pioneered, it is developing a product to be announced in June at the Toronto ALA/CLA Annual Conference. I was told it will be written in Java, use a CASPR-built Java database, be based on XML technology, and use SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for searching and information exchange. I was also told it will be freely downloadable, automatically upgradable without library involvement, very easy to use, and cost between $400 and $500.

Speaking of cost, I was told by one vendor rep whose word I trust on such matters that most of the vendor proposals his company is seeing are coming in within a 10% price range of each other. LMS prices have continued to fall to the point where there is not all that much price competition. One major exception is when a vendor such as Sirsi or Dynix offers discount pricing for customers to upgrade from their classic systems. But in evaluating such deals, librarians would do well to look at the maintenance fees they are asked to pay. Because both hardware and software are now much cheaper than they used to be, the maintenance on the new system they are upgrading to should be significantly lower than the maintenance fees they currently pay on their legacy system. As always in this business, caveat emptor.