By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorman@wesleyan.edu
By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorman@wesleyan.edu
Library-technology consultant based in Middletown, Connecticut.
Column for January 2004
This month’s column profiles three relatively unknown information technology vendors. Though very different from each other, all three companies came to the library market through their ability to develop real-world applications utilizing emerging information technology standards. And each of the three has evolved from focusing on specific technical problems to offering integrated solutions in a broad range of information-management challenges. As a group, they represent the evolution of the digital library from a concept to an emerging reality that is transforming modern librarianship as well as relations between libraries and their vendors.
“For PTFS and its customers, the digital library is a reality,” asserts John Yokley, CEO and cofounder of Progressive Technology Federal Systems. Starting with four employees in 1995 in Washington, D.C., to take advantage of the market for digital storage of government information, the company—which added its fifth employee and first librarian in 1996—currently has 90 full-time employees and gets 35% of its business from institutions other than the federal government.
Branching out from beginnings in digitization systems and services, PTFS began building its own digital library product, ArchivalWare, in 1998. In 2000 it released the first version. In November 2003, the company announced the release of version three, which has been ported over to the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform and comes with a documented Application Programming Interface (API) to enable customers to better integrate ArchivalWare with other library management products and services.
PTFS’s technology is used by other library vendors as well as libraries. Dynix uses ArchivalWare as the basis for its Horizon Digital Library product. PTFS markets Ex Libris to U.S. government agencies and has integrated ArchivalWare with Ex Libris’ MetaLIB software. “We don’t have exclusive agreements,” said Yokley. “We partner with many ILS vendors.” In addition to providing a back-end document-management system and a front-end user interface, the company partners with database-management and federated-search vendors to offer customized and complete digital library services. Dozens of research libraries and government agencies are among its customers. In addition to providing digital library software and consulting services, PTFS also provides staffing and other outsourcing services for libraries. In short, PTFS provides the full range of services needed to establish and operate today’s digital libraries.
“Information retrieval using open standards and open software is where we come from,” said Sebastian Hammer, cofounder in 1994, along with Adam Dickmeiss, of Index Data. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, the company has grown from the initial two principals to nine full-time employees. Its breadth of products and services has grown as well. Beginning with a few basic tools for implementing the Z39.50 information-retrieval protocol, it now offers a broad range of products and services to support all aspects of information discovery and management. But one thing that has not changed is the company’s commitment to open source solutions based on standards and a collaborative approach with their library customers.
The reach of the company has also broadened. From serving a few institutions in Denmark, their growing suite of open source tools—with names such as Yaz, Zap, and Zebra—are used by vendors and systems librarians around the world. Index Data also landed a contract this past May with the state of Texas to develop a single point of access to library catalogs and commercially licensed databases for public, school, and academic libraries throughout Texas. It’s called the Library of Texas, and is now online at www.tsl.state.tx.us/lot/. The company is also helping the Library of Congress bring its Z39.50 services up to the new ZING (Z39.50 International: Next Generation) standards.
Thanks to the commitment of Index Data to open source solutions for information retrieval, its zebra mascot could become for searching systems what the Linux penguin has become for operating systems: a symbol of achieving excellence through open sharing and collaboration.
“We think we can see a little bit into the future, so we are building a framework for interoperability and for managing metadata that we will deliver in our next-generation product. Our aim is to make metadata standards easy to work with by making them available in a standard format–RDF/XML [Resource Description Framework/extensible Markup Language].” Jonathan Brenchley, who wrote these words, began working as a freelance consultant in 1994. He soon found himself creating tools for the emerging metadata standards for the Eastern Region Public Health Observatory in Cambridge, England, one of a network of regional public health research and information dissemination organizations located throughout the United Kingdom. He formed HyperSpheric Solutions in 2000, and the company now employs eight people.
One of the major factors driving HyperSpheric Solutions’ software development is the new standards required by government and public sector organizations in Great Britain. Through the Govtalk initiative the public sector in the U.K. is developing the Governmental Interoperability Framework for electronic information, or e-GIF. One aspect of e-GIF defines a U.K. government standard version of the Dublin Core metadata set. Another aspect is a standard set of subject terms for classifying government information, the Government Category List, or GCL.
HyperSpheric Solutions has just released two new products to support these standards. The first is InterCom-TS (Terminology Server), an e-GIF–compliant server designed to enable an organization to maintain its own local thesauruses as well as to support the Government Category List using the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)’s RDF/XML semantic web standard. The second is InterCom-FW (FrameWork), which is designed to support metadata searching using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) based web services.
Although HyperSpheric Solutions does have one library customer, Britain’s National Electronic Library for Health, its other customers are not libraries per se. The company exemplifies the fact that the digital-information challenges libraries are facing are inherently no different than the challenges facing many modern information-intensive companies—and that the tools to deal with those challenges can work for all organizations that need to manage information.
In summary, one of the key ingredients in the evolution of the digital library from a concept to a reality is risk-taking and tech-savvy entrepreneurs who enthusiastically develop the practical tools to make the transition happen. They bring cutting-edge programming expertise and systems development knowledge to the task of transforming the new alphabet soup of technical information standards into working solutions for libraries and other information organizations. Their tools and expertise are being increasingly utilized by both fellow vendors and libraries to bring forth the future of digital library services.