Ex Libris Cloud: Open for Business

We have been focusing for the last few weeks on reaching the major milestone of establishing the Ex Libris Cloud environment. I am happy to report that those efforts are coming to fruition and that the Ex Libris Cloud is open for business. The third Alma Partner Release is being deployed, right on schedule, in the private cloud environment which will be introduced to our development partners for intensive training and testing during the coming weeks.

As the cloud environment serves as the basis for future technologies, we went to every length to establish a well formed environment. Our cloud services team, led by our new VP Cloud Services, has gained massive experience with hosting services – after all, over 1000 sites in North America alone are currently using hosted services offered by Ex Libris, such as Primo Central, bX and more. Their experience surely contributed to the success of the building of our cloud environment.

During the design and build of the cloud, the Alma development and product management team worked closely with the cloud services team to reinforce the guidelines of building a stable system. The environment conforms to leading industry standards in all levels and components. The cloud environment utilizes Alma’s multi tenancy architecture ensuring better performance to the customers. All of these measurements are implemented to verify customer's data is never lost, and service is never down.

As well as emphasizing system resiliency, we’re also constantly focusing on the need to secure the cloud. We're aware that security concerns are fundamental to the cloud environment and as such are always top priority for the cloud services team. Ex Libris has designed the multi-tiered security model which addresses major security concerns, such as personal data security and privacy. We also employ a full-time security officer, overseeing the whole process. You'll be able to read more about our cloud security in the Alma Security White Paper, to be published soon.

Another aspect of our cloud environment is the way we will be deploying software updates in line with the agile methodology that our development team practices. This methodology ensures that we minimize the time it takes Alma to adjust to market needs by having more frequent releases compared with traditional solutions, helping us to serve your needs faster. Watch this space for more on that in the coming weeks.

In short, I’m certain that our development partners will be enjoying our cloud environment with real peace of mind, ensuring that they can test the system as efficiently as possible.

Don't Stop Thinking About Digital Preservation

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” was Bill Clinton’s two-time campaign theme, quoting the famous Fleetwood Mac song, and for me it aptly describes digital preservation as well. The need to constantly think and act to ensure access over time to digital content makes it completely different from everything we know about preservation in the paper world.

One of the things I’ve noticed was high on the wish list of any preservation-minded person is the need for speed and scalability. In fact we are now discovering more frequently that institutions’ digital collections are no longer measured in thousands but rather in millions and even billions of assets. Digital collections and the digital world have triggered a huge change in the way we work and think and will have an even greater impact on the way we need to plan for the future. If in the past an archivist or librarian could know by heart his entire collection and help in describing and manage it in the digital world, due to the mass we need a more robust and automatic flow in all parts of our work.

To make sure Rosetta, the Ex Libris digital preservation solution, can answer these requirements, we carried out a series of extensive scalability tests that included testing the rate in which digital items can be ingested, the volume of records in the system, the rate at which items can be delivered and viewed, and more. The tests were done in a two step approach: firstly, by running the tests in our lab here in Jerusalem and secondly, by validating the results on the Rosetta systems of a US customer.

I won’t tell you the whole story and the process (that you can find in the recently published white paper) just a short summary of the conclusions:

• When calculating ingest throughput rates, many variables should be considered (files size, format variety, etc.). Rosetta can ingest many files in a short amount of time.
• Computing power does make the difference, from dedicated server to virtual server, your results can vary very much
• We have still not encountered a maximum limit of records. The system was tested with more than 50 million records and showed no sign of reaching the maximum limit.
• It’s all about bottlenecks. Find the next one, fix it and move forward

In short, it was an interesting process of both learning and understanding the changing needs in the digital age. I invite all of you to read the white paper.

I started with one US president and will end with paying homage and reversing the words of another: Ask not what you can do with Rosetta; ask what Rosetta can do for you!

August's Dog Days

Although for many of us, summer is our favorite season, there's something to be said for anticipating autumn. Here in New England we've been enjoying a warmer season than past summers so I for one am looking forward to cool nights and crispness again, if not a decrease in daily light. I can tell by the upticks in correspondence and other activities that our customers are now on their way back from their holidays and are planning for the start of the academic calendar -- at least in the northern hemisphere.

The bX scholarly article recommender has been having a hot summer too. We're now numbering over 300 institutions, including several of the very top academic sites in the world. We released development which allows bX to be utilized in various library interfaces and worked with customers of Serials Solutions 360 Link to include it in their service menus. Server stats are higher than ever. Feels like there's no stopping us!

And summer's not always calm for students either. This week I received a comment from Adam, a masters' student in engineering in the UK. (How many students take the time to write to the library software company?! Those engineers!)

But it was great fuel: "I have just used bX for the first time and am very impressed...I expected there to be a fair bit of repetition between the suggestions and my existing results [saved in RefWorks], but to my surprise and delight the tool returned many papers I had not yet seen...this is a very promising development and seems already quite powerful. I would love to see continued development of this tool and look forward to using it in the future."

Well, Adam, we look forward to developing it for you!

As students return to school, this could be a prime time to run a free 30-day trial of bX and add a feedback link to the service. You just might be surprised at what they say!

URM first partner release; first seeds planted

The last few weeks have been very exciting for Ex Libris and the URM team. In mid-June the first partner release of the URM system was successfully deployed, on schedule, at our development partner sites. We're calling it a partner release as it's only available to our partner sites. Since then we have carried out training and the first cycle of data migration. This is a major milestone in the URM development project!

Because URM is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS), which takes the hosted model further than ever before, it provides a low-cost, efficient infrastructure, without the customer having to invest in hardware, configuration or maintenance costs. As part of the first partner release, the URM team and development partners are evaluating the Amazon public cloud as a potential hosting infrastructure (other hosting options may be evaluated in future releases).

The development partners have been introduced to the new and attractive web-based UI of the system. When we first explored the system, what excited us most about the UI is its contemporary and intuitive look-and-feel. The design team has done a wonderful job of defining coherent workflows for some pretty complex tasks. The lobby in the main screen, which is divided into logical sections, leads the user straight to the menu he needs. Everything is a few clicks away!

This partner release includes a selection of modules and workflows, including circulation desk activities, user management, staff search, acquisition flows, and activities in the system’s repository. The range of the available functionalities shows that the development team is making terrific progress, enabling the user to test major functions in the system, even in this early stage.
Each partner is using a sandbox environment to view and explore URM. The partners can see their own data, which was migrated from their legacy systems, enabling them to test and experience the system as close to real life as possible.

The URM release team, dedicated to implementation and communication with the partners, which we are part of, is working closely with our partners to gather their feedback on the system. We are currently guiding them through the system to ensure they explore and feel comfortable with the system’s features.

This joint project with the development partners—kicked-off with this first partner release of URM—continues the Ex Libris tradition of collaborating with our customer community at a very early stage of product development, making the customers part of the product’s evolution.

Scheduled for mid-November, the next partner release (the second of five) will include a wide range of functionalities and features. Stay tuned for more information on the progress of URM development. We will try to keep up with the pace of the project!

Sarit Kozokin and David Zyroff, URM Product Release Team

A conundrum...

It would be almost impossible for Ex Libris and our URM development partners to build a next-generation library management solution without asking a lot of challenging questions and continually repeating the mantra of “Think Differently!” It goes without saying that much has happened in the years since the current generation of library management products was developed –technology is advancing, suppliers are consolidating, and library goals are changing. As we design a system that can accommodate the current and future needs of libraries, it can be a challenge to balance the “traditional” workflows and processes that we’ve become accustomed to – and, in many cases, that we’ve optimized – with opportunities to do things in different ways.

As we’ve worked with our URM development partners, one area that has become the source of – shall we say lively? – discussion is the metadata editor and, in particular, the MARC cataloging interface.

On the one hand, we know that the demands of a production cataloging environment call for rapid data entry – and many libraries have optimized their workflows to ensure the greatest productivity in this regard. Further, many of our current cataloging tools and practices can be traced back to the days of terminal-based systems. While the library community has reaped countless benefits in moving away from those legacy systems, the environment often did make it easier to perform data-entry intensive tasks. Many catalogers still prefer a more text-based user interface, with options for keyboard-driven commands and navigation, for exactly this reason. As one of our partners noted, “The most repetitive part of a cataloger’s job is the encoding – and once you know the rules for creating and editing a MARC record, anything that slows down that process causes a lot of frustration.”

On the other, in a next-generation environment, we have opportunities to introduce new efficiencies by moving away from a text-based interface. With a new, more “element-based” editor, the URM could assist users in the entry of controlled values in appropriate record fields and subfields. For new or less-experienced staff, learning how to describe the library’s resources could be simplified through the use of text-labeled elements that link to contextualized online help resources. And beginning to work in a new editing environment will also likely pave the way for the implementation of new XML-based metadata formats, something that is of increasing interest to our partners and to the larger library community.

The possible opportunities in a next-generation environment prompted Ex Libris and our development partners to consider a trade-off: should we stick with what works for us now, or should we move toward a different interface that supports new efficiencies? And this question was only further complicated as we looked to the future – a future in which other types of record formats are likely to predominate and in which shared, community-centric metadata (supported by the URM’s Metadata Management System) will play a huge role.

This certainly hasn’t been the only tough question we’ve had to address in planning URM functionality, but because it touches an area in which productivity is so important, it’s been one of the hardest. After quite a bit of consideration and evaluation, our development team came up with a solution that will work best for the product and its users, one that elegantly combines the benefits of a text-based editor with many of the features enabled by an element-based editor. As an example, the URM MARC editor will support index look-ups, even in fields with multiple subfields. We feel that this solution supports the best of both worlds – providing new efficiencies without compromising on the productivity we’ve achieved in our current cataloging environments.

Kathryn

Coming to Life: Agile Development and the URM

One of the most exciting parts of being a product manager is getting to see your “baby” come to life – and last week ended with one of those moments for me. But I’m getting ahead of myself; let’s start at the beginning…

In building the URM, Ex Libris is applying a number of “agile development” techniques. For those of you unfamiliar with this methodology, it’s a newer approach to software development that emphasizes rapid, yet high-quality delivery; ongoing review and adaptation; and a business approach that aligns product development with customer needs and company goals. The goal is to create an agile process (hence the name) that allows us to review and test our work as we go, modifying the URM functionality as needed to meet our success criteria.

From a product management perspective, the URM team works closely with our colleagues in development to prioritize the functionality that is added to the product in a series of month-long development iterations or “sprints”. Ultimately, these sprints are packaged into a “drop” – a set of end-to-end workflows across functional areas that can be implemented and tested with real data by our partners. As part of this process, we’ll be creating an ongoing cycle of feedback and adjustments based on our partners’ experiences. Our first drop will be delivered to our URM partner libraries in June of this year, with successive drops approximately every 3-4 months thereafter until our last drop – the complete v. 1 release – in the second half of next year.

And, because we’re building upon the proven infrastructure of Rosetta, Ex Libris’s solution for preservation of digital assets, we have a huge “leg up” on many of the core pieces of functionality necessary in the URM – things like operator management and privileges, the inventory model, and more are already in place and ready to go with little or no modification required.

Which brings me to last week. My colleagues in development finished the first official URM sprint, which included a number of demonstrable features. While I had an opportunity to review a lot of work, including the infrastructure for user interfaces and menu systems, the thing that made me really happy is the implementation of currency management services. Now why get excited about, of all things, currency management? Well, I’ve always wanted an acquisitions module that would automatically query an external currency service and update the conversion rates. And in January, the URM development team made it happen! For the many libraries that order in multiple currencies, the URM will eliminate all of the manual work that’s currently necessary to ensure accurate, real-time commitments and expenditures in selection and acquisition. Hear, hear!

We also finalized our planning for February’s sprint last week, and I can’t wait to see – and provide feedback on – this month’s deliverables. Stay tuned for more information on the URM…and the new features that are evolving even as I write!

Kathryn

Welcome Primo Central Library Partners

As 2009 draws to a close, we are taking a moment to look back, with amazement, at the extraordinary developments in the library discovery environment. It is less than a year ago that services such as Primo Central—offering scholars the wealth of global e-content integrated with local library collections—started to emerge. Of all the stakeholders that have embraced this new approach, it is the publishers who should be most applauded for their positive response to this way of enhancing the discoverability of their content. Last week we were pleased to announce the first Primo Central partner libraries. Here’s the list:

- Brigham Young University (United States)
- Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium)
- Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg—KOBV Consortium institutions: Humboldt University, Free University of Berlin, Mannheim University, and the Technological University, Berlin (Germany)
- Michiana Academic Library Consortium institutions: University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary's College, Holy Cross College, and Bethel College (United States)
- Oxford University (United Kingdom)
- University of New South Wales (Australia)
- Vanderbilt University (United States)
- Yonsei University (South Korea)

This international group of library partners, representing scholarly excellence across the globe, will begin beta-testing Primo Central next month and check how this new service works with the institutional Primo system. A wonderful advantage of having such a heterogeneous group of partners is that they can help us learn how well we address language issues, regional content, a variety of organizational structures, and a range of disciplinary focuses. We’re looking forward to working with our partners and receiving their valuable feedback.

The Primo Central index continues to grow. More and more publishers are joining the many who already participate in the Primo Central Publisher program. Within just the last two weeks, we signed agreements to add scholarly content from Cambridge University Press, the University of Chicago Press, Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., JSTOR, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), RMIT Publishing, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. By the time Primo Central is released to the general public, we anticipate that this index will include approximately half a billion records.

We are pleased that so many distinguished publishers understand that Primo Central is another way for them to enhance the “findability” of their treasures without losing control of their intellectual rights and are thus working with us to get their data into Primo Central. Ex Libris, libraries, and information providers all share a common vision: bringing the world of knowledge to users. And the Primo Central service--an Ex Libris initiative that will benefit both libraries and information providers--fulfills this goal perfectly.