A Mariachi band greeted attendees at the opening of the Exhibit Hall at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego.

While foot traffic was light at times in the Exhibit Hall, vendor partnership announcements kept the hall humming.

TLC representatives present a check for $5,000 to benefit ALA’s “Every Child Ready to Read @ Your Library” project.

An elevated platform afforded visitors to the ProQuest booth a different perspective of the hall.

Technically Speaking

By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist

Marketing manager for Index Data.
This is his last Technically Speaking column.

Column for March 2004

Dorman’s Last Roundup

Partnerships to expand functionality, product differentiation to create a market advantage, and the emergence of data-mining software were the grand themes of the Exhibit Hall at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego. Metasearch services, while still in their beginning stages, are becoming a major focus of innovation and development in the library technology vendor community, and data mining is close behind. For those of you who just want the big picture, you need read no further. But if you want to explore the particulars and learn about a few other trends as well, read on.

Traffic in the exhibit area was generally light, but vendor networking seemed to pick up the slack. Vendor-to-vendor discussions were in evidence during all of the exhibit hours. The one complaint I heard over and over was that the exhibit-area Internet connections were flaky throughout the conference. One of the lighter—or darker, take your choice—moments occurred over an objection to the live webcam that Endeavor had pointing toward a spot on the exhibit floor for the purpose of giving non–conference goers a virtual exhibits experience. A competitor told Endeavor to point its live webcam away from his company’s booth. Years ago when Gaylord put up a live webcam, a competitor surreptitiously turned the camera toward his own booth. Times have changed.

Handshaking Happening

“Partner” seems to have been the magic word at VTLS recently. In the six months prior to this conference, the company made a concerted effort to identify its product shortcomings and overcome them with partnerships: with Fretwell-Downing to resell VDX as the ILL part of Virtua; with FEDORA as the technology behind its new content-management service, Vital; with Cybrarian for PC Control and Internet filtering; with FKI Logistics for a book-return sorting system; and the list goes on.

And VTLS was not the only vendor seeking new partnerships. Fretwell-Downing partnered with Infotrieve to provide a seamless integration between VDX ILL management and Ariel document transmission services. TLC partnered with Tech Logic to offer an RFID system. Dynix announced a new collaboration with OverDrive to integrate that company’s e-book services into the Horizon system.

TLC representatives also presented PLA and ALSC leaders with a check for $5,000 to benefit the joint PLA/ALSC project “Every Child Ready to Read @ Your Library.” For every conference attendee badge scanned at the TLC booth, the company donated $5 to the project. A $25 TLC donation was made for each attendee who attended a product demonstration. The donation was part of a fundraising program TLC created to celebrate its 30-year anniversary. TLC will continue the program at the PLA national conference (Seattle) and ALA Annual Conference (Orlando).

Endeavor and MuseGlobal formed a strategic alliance, under which the two companies meet quarterly to share technology planning for metasearch services. In addition, MuseGlobal has both strengthened its focus on selling through partners and made its licensing arrangements more flexible. Library management system vendors can now select which MuseGlobal software and services to license, and they will be able to market MuseGlobal software as add-on functions and/or integrate MuseGlobal technology into their own products under their own brands.

The Pendulum Diverges Again

The library management and information retrieval software market seems to swing from convergence, when all the vendors compete to provide the same products and services, to divergence, when each vendor picks specific areas on which to focus development. In the 1990s most of the library management systems were converging toward the same functionality, from the same major modules (acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, ILL, materials booking, reserves, serials management) to the same major bells and whistles (telephone renewal, report writers, global record changes, self-checkout).

Now that this convergence has largely been achieved, the emerging arena of digital library services is swinging the pendulum back toward divergence. Vendors are faced with too many development choices to do everything at once, so each is selecting its own unique mix of functionality and development priorities. The end goal of all the LMS vendors is still to offer a full suite of digital library services, but it will be a few years before this new arena of development matures enough to allow the pendulum to swing back toward convergence.

After spending 2003 focusing on strengthening such metasearch services as OpenURL resolvers, harvesters, parallel searching, and portal management, Endeavor is now putting greater emphasis on content management. In San Diego the company announced ENCompass for Journals Onsite, a new service initiative based on an Elsevier product.

2003 was the year that Dynix put its major development focus on giving Horizon all the bells and whistles necessary to entice Dynix ILS customers to switch to Horizon. The current release contains over 100 features new to Horizon that many Dynix ILS customers have been asking for. While this porting over of Dynix ILS functionality to Horizon will continue into 2004, it will do so at a slower pace, as the company shifts more development effort into NCIP support and Horizon Portal digital library services.

TLC is following VTLS into RFID and FRBR support. The company has begun working on FRBRizing its catalog and has made the development of RFID services a priority for 2004.

Gaylord Information Systems (GIS) and Innovative Interfaces featured support for wireless communications, each company with its own twist. GIS is focusing on managing “hot spot” access through authentication based on SIP2-compliant protocols. Innovative’s newest wireless product is a handheld workstation that can perform circulation and inventory control functions in real time via its wireless connection to the Millennium system.

GIS is also stressing the fact that almost all the new functionality it adds to Polaris comes with the basic system at no extra cost. Exceptions are the children’s catalog, telephone notification, and the addition of a new language to the user interface. Innovative is very proud of its Electronic Resource Management Module for supporting digital collections. The company believes this product puts it ahead of the other LMS vendors in this area, and it is making a concerted effort to market the product to innovative (but non-Innovative) libraries.

Auto-Graphics’ focus for its AGent suite of library management software is on its suitability for complex consortial environments. The user interface, for example, can have a half-dozen different designs: the state view, the region view, the consortia view, all the way down to the individual patron view. A future release will extend the functionality of the current multilanguage interface to user-clickable language changes in real time.

Warehousing and Mining

Until quite recently, most library management systems have been able to offer reports on the library collection and its use through a standard database report writer that worked off the bibliographic database, the patron database, and some standard transaction files. These limited reporting systems are now on the trailing edge of technology. On the leading edge is data warehousing. Information Builders defines a “data warehouse” as “a consolidated view of an organization’s data, optimized for reporting and analysis. It’s an aggregated, sometimes summarized, copy of transaction and non-transaction data specifically structured for dynamic queries and analytics.” “Data mining” refers to the retrieval and analysis of stored data for decision-making support. Marrying these two concepts is the latest hot trend in the business world, and now it is coming to library management systems as well.

The first library management system vendor I am aware of that began incorporating data warehousing/mining capabilities into its system was BiblioMondo. Its data-mining functionality was developed largely under contract with the Bibliothèque Nationale de Québec and is now operational. It uses Oracle data-warehousing technology. Sirsi demonstrated an impressive-looking product in San Diego called the Sirsi Director’s Station. Ex Libris announced that it, too, will be offering a product called the Aleph 500 Data Warehouse. It will be based on Brio software. Brio, which was recently acquired by Hyperion, a leading producer of business software, offers products that query, analyze, and report on data from SQL-fronted database management systems such as Oracle.

Library Dynamics, a division of Paratext, has developed the most impressive data-analysis product I saw in the exhibits. The product analyzes and compares collections for decision support more deeply and thoroughly than any other collection analysis product I have seen. After talking with folks from BiblioMondo and Library Dynamics, I am convinced that an all-purpose data-mining product has significant limitations, because no generic tool can serve all analytic needs well. The best products are those that are tailored for very specific types of analysis, because each kind of data analysis requires its own software. The deeper the developer’s understanding of the type of analysis being attempted, the better the product will be. This area presents new evaluation challenges for libraries as they compare features and functions of various vendor offerings.

Chasing Market Segments

Endeavor continues to stick to its focus on the academic market. While it has a toehold in special libraries, it has no present plans to enter the public or school library markets. Ex Libris, on the other hand, has been gradually preparing itself to enter the North American public library arena in a major way. It is continuing to work on the added functionality it requires to be a strong contender in this market. For example, the company is redesigning its materials-booking module, a sure sign that it is readying its software for public libraries. TLC, which sells mainly to public libraries and school districts, will be putting an increased effort this year into capturing more special library sales.

VTLS is engaged in a major development and marketing effort to snag a piece of the large U.S. academic library market. In support of this goal, the company presented a new image and a broadened development agenda at the exhibits. Its booth and marketing materials received a total makeover, and the VTLS initials now stand for Visionary Technology in Library Solutions.

VTLS faces an initial hurdle, because most ARL libraries are loath to deviate from the small set of LMS vendor choices made by their peers, and so far VTLS has not made those first few breakthrough sales that would establish the company as an acceptable choice in the large academic library market in the United States.

Utility News

RedLightGreen, FRBR-like functionality added to the RLG Union Catalog to support undergraduate use of library catalogs, was quietly launched last September. Development will continue on this pilot project, thanks to additional grant funding from the Mellon Foundation. See what they’ve done so far at www.rlg.org/redlightgreen/. But the biggest news from RLG is that it is migrating from the database management system, Spires, that it has been using for 20 years, and will be switching to IBM’s DB2 product. The new platform will be called RLIN21.

OCLC has come one step closer to being the most prolific virtual catalog generator in the known universe. Assuming that OCLC has 2,500 cataloging members, the company’s new Group Catalog capabilities gives it the possibility of creating 22500–1 virtual catalogs out of WorldCat. What a market opportunity! By March, the cooperative plans to have a published API that will allow another vendor or library to use WorldCat as a target from its own interface, all the while replicating the service’s rich functionality.

OCLC also continues to move forward with its goal of making all of WorldCat searchable on the open Web. Its Open WorldCat Pilot has made a subset of 2 million abbreviated WorldCat records Web-searchable. To preview the service, visit www.oclc.org/worldcat/pilot/how/.

Open Source Gains

Open source software continues to make inroads in the library market. Even as I wrote earlier that “it is only a matter of time before a farsighted library vendor takes the risk to invest in a well-thought-out and well-organized open source initiative such as FEDORA,” VTLS was planning to do just that. In San Diego the company announced Vital, a content-management and parallel-searching product built around FEDORA, which VTLS obtained under a BSD-type license, enabling the company to wrap proprietary software around the core open source FEDORA architecture. The company also combined assorted bits of open source code into a OAI-PMH-compliant metadata harvester they are calling VORTEX. The software is distributed under a GNU GPL license and is downloadable from the VTLS site.

Virtually all the library management system vendors I spoke to seemed attuned to the potential for taking advantage of open source software. CASPR will be going one step further by releasing the next version of its LibraryNet LMS as Open Source Software. “85% of our revenues come from maintenance agreements rather than sales of software, so we think we are in a good position to do this,” said the company’s president, Norman Kline. As of press time, Kline had not yet decided what form of open source license to use or on what websites the source code will be posted.

Music—The Digital Way

Classical International (formerly Classical.com) is growing up. It has significantly expanded its music retrieval functionality: Free one-minute clips and links to additional music-related content are two of the features it was demonstrating in San Diego. Additional major service enhancements are well along in the pipeline. A company spokesperson told me that a contract with a major classical music label is just around the corner, and will result in a significant expansion of the company’s musical offerings.

Paratext has taken its searching functionality to a new level of integration with local library catalogs. When a Paratext user queries the company’s Reference Universe database, the search client automatically extracts the ISBNs in the retrieved citations and immediately launches a search against the local library’s Web PAC. Any matches coming back from the library catalog cause a holding symbol to be displayed along with the retrieved citation, indicating that the library owns the book from which the citation came. Because each query against the library catalog occurs in real time, the holdings information is always current. Now that’s pretty slick.

Until We Meet Again

This exhibit roundup is my final contribution to American Libraries as a regular columnist. When I began writing “Technically Speaking” in July 1995 I had this to say (AL, Sept. 1995, p. 806) about the exhibits at the 1995 ALA Annual Conference:

“Everywhere I turned I saw old products that were being repositioned as Web-based products, and new products that were developed from the ground up with Web-based software. I cannot remember a time when a technology trend has so swiftly and so completely transformed the library marketplace.”

I was fortunate in these intervening years to have a monthly platform to chronicle this rapid and profound transformation.

A new technology trend, evolving more slowly, but promising to be just as profound, began to emerge in the library marketplace around the turn of the millennium: library applications built on open source software. My relationship to this trend has become increasingly personal: I have not only observed it with fascination, I have become its advocate. Earlier this year, I profiled Index Data, a company I had been following for many years, because I felt it was just beginning to burst forth from its Z39.50 techie roots into a major force in the metasearch arena.

After I finished the article, Sebastian Hammer, a cofounder of Index Data, and I kept up our correspondence, and we both decided that I had a lot to offer the company. And because I had just left my job in Illinois and moved to Connecticut, I was in a position to actively explore a relationship. I traveled to Copenhagen, and as an outcome of that trip, now represent the company as its U.S. marketing manager.

Although my new position represents a conflict of interest with respect to continuing to author this column, it also represents an affirmation of my own professional and ethical values. I fully expect my new role as advocate for open source software and Index Data to be as enjoyable and rewarding as my now ending role of marketplace observer for American Libraries. I sincerely hope that “Technically Speaking” has been as engaging for you to read as it has been for me to write. May libraries continue to thrive and may we all strive to honor the profession and its values with our best efforts.