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If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em
Head of Systems, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh. Column for September 2005 One of the things I love about librarianship is our tendency to hedge our bets. That’s the nicer way of saying that we look after the lowest common denominator or try to be all things to all people. Our professional ethos makes this mandate clear: every reader his book; bridging the digital divide; one person’s airplane novel is another person’s Shakespeare. We have our own versions of this in the technology world, as well: With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow; it’s all customizable; usability is key. In reality, we know that it is impossible to be everything to everyone. Undergraduates and faculty have different needs at a university. Grade schoolers, baby boomers, and seniors have differing views of the public library. Nevertheless, we now love to hold up the great equalizer—the Web. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and the rest aren’t after a single demographic, they’re after all of them. Even aarp.org is pretty hip and showed me how to jazz up my favorite grill offerings with sensational salsas. Google freaks and cynicsI have long been an advocate of taking lessons from commercial internet ventures to improve patron services. Our profession (including vendors) has taken this to new extremes in the last several months. If I had to pinpoint a starting point, I would say it was a little professional freak-out called Google Scholar. According to its website, Google Scholar “enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature.” Despite what seemed like the natural progression that started with indexing OCLC WorldCat content, journal article content in CrossRef, and deep linking into various digital repositories, somehow Google’s announcement spelled the end of everything from metasearch and aggregator databases to collection development and even libraries themselves. While I remain a bit of a Google cynic, I laud the librarians who cajoled sweeter juice from the bitter navel-gazing of others. Peter Binkley of the University of Alberta was one of the first to create a browser extension for Firefox that would add SFX link resolvers to citations in Google Scholar. Link resolvers standardize citations from disparate resources using OpenURL and compare the citations to a local library’s holdings—a middleman for finding full text of articles. Dozens of refinements followed, including plugins for Internet Explorer, links to other services, and ultimately a link-resolver service offering from Google itself. It was this last move that made other vendors scramble. Despite long conversations with key players in the world of the OpenURL (the standard behind link-resolver systems), Google opted to bypass the standard itself and require libraries (through their various vendors) to send information about holdings to Google so that Google might create better service links to full text in libraries. You see, the Google index can’t create an OpenURL because it crawls the full text content itself and knows nothing about citations. Surprisingly, what’s in it for Google is less clear than what’s in it for libraries. We add serendipitous access to commercial content that we are already paying for. Google needs a revenue angle, and I’d be willing to bet it will find one. But until then, link resolvers—SFX from Ex Libris, 1Cate from Openly Informatics, WebBridge from Innovative Interfaces, Article Linker from Serials Solutions, and others, I am sure—are rushing to equip their software so that libraries can send holdings information to Google. I’m also sure that at some point Google will not be the only destination; OCLC is keenly interested in capturing digital holdings information for its collaborative cataloging. I don’t fault Google for attempting to delve deeper into library content, but I would have much preferred a quid pro quo arrangement with Google when sending it my library’s holdings. That is, if its remote knowledge base is to include a library’s commercial content holdings, why can’t the library’s local knowledge base know about all the freely available access points for the articles in the Google index? All our efforts have been on providing access from Google Scholar to paid content, and there has been little talk of providing reference linking access from our local services to the repositories crawled by Google. Both sides against the middleOf course, another strategy is to simply have information providers supply their content directly to the search engines, bypassing the library (and our precarious middleman-to-middleman footing) altogether. Combined with adding link resolvers to web indexes, I call this one playing both sides against the middle. And guess who’s in the middle. Thomson Gale recently announced that it will allow major search engines (lest we forget there are only really four big players on the market) to crawl its content. While Google has concentrated on freely available repositories, Yahoo seems to be carving its niche out of the commercial content sector, like Gale. I feel confident that, at the very least, most article aggregators will follow Gale’s lead on attempting a micropayment model for their content. Would that libraries could rise to the challenge in advertising the availability of licensed content better than we already do. I’ve played with Google Scholar and pay-per-view services for a bit and found it a generally unsatisfying experience. Though, to be fair, I feel the same way about most article databases. Maybe next time, I’ll ask a librarian. Open Source WatchA group of library technologists, including Daniel Chudnov of Yale University’s Center for Medical Informatics, Openly Informatics President Eric Hellman, and Ross Singer of Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center, have launched OpenURL COinS (ContextObjects in Span). Described as an ad hoc community specification, COinS seeks to simplify publishing OpenURL references in HTML documents. OpenURL was built to send citation metadata to a link resolver. COinS extends the utility of OpenURL by defining a way for authors and publishers to embed metadata into documents in order to ease this transmission. More information is available at www.ocoins.info. Contracts and Agreements
The province of Liège in Belgium, replacing a homegrown system.
Lambton County (Ontario, Canada) Library, replacing a legacy system.
Glenbrook (Ill.) High School District 225 and the Eugene (Org.) School District 4J, replacing CASPR and Dynix, respectively.
Eight Jordanian universities in a consortium comprising Arabian Advanced Systems, CEB, and Dynix, by the Kingdom of Jordan’s Higher Education Development Project. Announcements and AcquisitionsThe Normative Data Project (NDP), sponsored by SirsiDynix, has unveiled a new interface for the library community. The NDP provides access to circulation data, graphs, and reports for libraries across North America. NDP subscribers have access to a wealth of comparative demographic data for collection and financial decision-making. Moreover, free NDP access has been granted to ALA-accredited library schools for classroom and research use. In a somewhat startling move, OCLC Pica (the European arm of OCLC) has acquired all shares of Sisis Informationssysteme GmbH, a German library-management system company. Active mainly in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, Sisis will add a suite of technology and customers to OCLC Pica’s repertoire. The move also denotes OCLC’s serious international expansion as a worldwide cooperative focused on library technology. |
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