Continuing the collaboration – Our First URM Solution Review Meeting

On September 22nd and 23rd, members of the Ex Libris URM team were joined by over a dozen staff from our [now FOUR!] Collaborative Development Partners for a Solution Review meeting on cataloging and metadata management in the URM [Unified Resource Management]. The three original Partners – Boston College, Princeton University and KU Leuven [Belgium] were recently joined by Purdue University, who signed on as a URM Partner only a few days prior to the scheduled meetings. Welcome Purdue! We held the meetings at the Firestone Library on the campus of Princeton University during two days of Indian summer.

The Solution Review is the first of two major milestone meetings Ex Libris will be having with Partners for each of the major “tracks” we have set up for URM: Cataloging/Metadata Management, Selection/Acquisitions, Fulfillment/Patron Management and Digital Content. The second series of milestone meetings will focus on Design Review for each of the tracks.

The primary goal of the two day meeting was for Ex Libris to review with the Partners our planned cataloging solution for URM, seeking input and feedback throughout. We encouraged and received wide participation by the staff from the Partner libraries as we discussed the functionality of cataloging and metadata management, reviewed early mock-ups and analyzed workflows. The packed agenda had major sessions on:

• Current metadata practices and workflows
• Community zone use cases
• Import – both bulk and individual – of records
• Searching capabilities
• Editing of metadata and resource records
• Authority control and related processing
• Publishing and dissemination of records to external sources and environments
• The role of Registries in managing metadata
• Catalog sharing within the URM.

We kicked off the meetings with a high level review of our goals for metadata management in the URM:

• Centralize descriptive metadata for all resources libraries manage—print, electronic, and digital
• Reduce redundant work across many institutions
• Improve metadata through joint upkeep
• Streamline time-consuming processes
• Create a platform for meaningful management of disparate descriptive standards.

To make this more concrete, we reviewed with the Partners what we see as some of the most important questions we need to answer across the board as we develop URM:

• What are the problems you need to solve?
• What do you want to be able to do MORE of?
• What would you like to ELIMINATE?
• What are the NEW things you want to be able to do NOW and in the FUTURE?

We revisited these questions, and their answers, throughout the course of the discussions, trying our best to stay true to the goals and objectives of the URM even as we discussed quite detailed points of functionality.

Thanks to John Larson, Dana Shavit-Moscovitz and Asaf Kline of Ex Libris for the hard work they did preparing for the meetings. Thanks to the staff at Princeton who made our stay there so pleasant, particularly the hastily arranged tour of the new Lewis Library designed by Frank Gehry. And, heartiest thanks to the staff from Princeton, Boston College, Leuven and Purdue who attended the meeting and contributed so openly.

Susan Stearns
Ex Libris

New service, new reactions

I've been spending some time over the last few weeks calling up some of our bX customers and getting their reactions to the new scholarly article recommender service they've implemented for their users. These conversations are essential to me in my job as product manager, to better understand what changes we can/should make in bX, to make it the best it can be. Definitely, everyone finds bX a fascinating concept but often they are not really sure what will happen when they implement it.

While these conversations have not been terribly long, they've all managed to bring new and unique perspectives. Different comments for sure, but everyone is looking forward to the new school term starting next month (for most places) and introducing bX to their new and returning students.

In some institutions, the reactions so far have been mainly by librarians - I attribute that to the academic calendar right now. Several of these librarians have been impressed about how easy bX is to use - the recommendations simply appear and the user may click on them. "Anyone who is familiar with Amazon knows exactly what to do." This technique is observed by the librarians to be quite intuitive and useful, particularly for new users, unfamiliar with library interfaces (and in some cases what they are actually looking for!).

One library created a small feedback form specifically for bX - it appears just above their recommendation section on the SFX menu. They passed on some feedback from PhD users (researching through the summer, ugh...) which made me smile from ear to ear for the rest of the day: "this is fabulous" came from one; another wrote a bit more: "I found exactly what I wanted. I've already found even more relevant articles in 10 minutes than I've found in the last 10 months using more traditional methods of research." Wow!

Even though bX is focused on maximizing the implicit feedback of end users (through use of SFX usage statistics), you just can't beat the explicit feedback, can you!? We can't wait for the autumn, when more students can use this.

ALA was a blast for bX!

Last week, we proudly presented the new bX scholarly recommender service to customers and prospects at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual conference in Chicago. This was the first ALA for bX, now that it's out of development and in production at many libraries, so it was a very exciting time for all Ex Libris staff involved, to be able to show it, talk about it "for real," and inform those interested that it's immediately available.

There was a lot of interest at the Ex Libris booth -- Loralynne Evans, our North American marketing manager, had made up colorful badges in order to prompt questions, and they worked! We showed many live demos of the bX service at the booth, and even had opportunities to chat about it while standing in line for lunch at the Au Bon Pain downstairs in the convention center.

Marshall Breeding, noted library industry journalist, wrote about bX for the next issue of "Smart Libraries Newsletter." Thanks to the agreement of ALA TechSource, we were able to print copies of this article for distribution at the booth.

In addition to the booth demos, we also held a separate session, dedicated to bX, in the Chicago Hilton on Sunday morning. Many dozens of customers and prospects found their way to the "basement ballroom" in order to hear a three-part presentation which featured Bob Gerrity from Boston College and Oren Beit-Arie and me from Ex Libris.

Oren was the set-up man: he talked about the importance of user contribution in online environments; changes going on in scholarly communication; how recommender systems in general enhance discovery processes; how bX recommendations are generated and how we are really just at the beginning of more intelligent applications of aggregate usage data.



Bob, of course, spoke from the library point of view; he described Boston College's approach to its library users and how the staff fosters a willingness to experiment, as well as how the BC librarians feel that library contribution of data to aggregate data sets is important for improvement of services. He also described BC's participation in the bX alpha testing program earlier this year and how its (picky! detail-oriented!) subject librarians contributed to the test and verified quality of recommendations.

I showed screenshots and live demos of the service from various bX customer libraries as well as the steps for the registration process. Here's just a few...
Aalborg University
Boston College
Stellenbosch University
University of Calgary

Audience members were enthused and peppered us with questions covering all aspects of the system; many indicated an intention to buy in time for the new school term which is fast approaching.

We are all looking forward to continuing bX on its worldly way -- over 100 sites from Australia to China to USA to Finland to Israel to Canada to South Africa (15 countries so far) have signed up to license or trial the service since its launch!

Primo Central—more data for discovery, better service to end users, less hassle for libraries

We are very happy to announce today the introduction of a new Primo component, Primo Central. Primo Central indexes scholarly materials such as articles and e-books provided by publishers and aggregators, and is seamlessly integrated into local Primo systems. Primo Central will be managed by Ex Libris as a service available to all Primo customers.

Primo is designed from the outset as a tool for libraries and librarians, focusing on the uniqueness of each library and the particular way that libraries make information discovery work for their communities of users. To support the needs of hundreds of different libraries and the varying ways in which information providers enable their data, Primo offers a range of search technologies including ‘native’ search of local and remote Primo indexes and metasearch of licensed resources. Primo Central complements the Primo searching capabilities by enabling a library to offer fast, effective, and seamless access to the entire library offering. With Primo Central, users will be able to transparently search in locally-managed collections and global e-content with the search results blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Primo enables libraries to leverage the power of the network and the community through this inclusion of shared content, while maintaining the freedom to achieve superior results for their users in the way best for them--all of this with little, if any, effort by the library.

E-content in Primo Central can be configured locally to determine the search scope, restricting this to subscribed resources only, or broadening this to extend beyond the library’s collection, particularly where pay-per-view options may enable users to reach the requested material. Similarly, search results can be filtered to show only those results for which full-text is available to the user. Real-time availability is ‘built-in’.

Ex Libris will be working with library partners on the ongoing development of Primo Central which will be in beta release at the end of 2009. For those of you attending the upcoming ALA Conference in Chicago, don't forget to attend the Primo presentation or see a preview of Primo Central at the Ex Libris booth #1015.

To find out more about Primo Central, visit the Ex Libris Website.

How does your digital preservation initiative compare?

Most libraries and archives who are learning about, planning or implementing a digital preservation initiative pause, at least once in awhile, to wonder; how do they compare to their peers? Are they doing better, worse; are they covering all the essential points? We’ve recently begun conducting a series of regional symposia on Digital Preservation that help in this regard. Our goal in doing this is to help libraries and archives understand the needs, challenges and possibilities surrounding digital preservation and to do so in a forum where peers can freely share information. The results have been interesting and insightful.

At a high level, the question being asked by all is: How will we guarantee the authenticity and accessibility of the terabytes and now petabytes of all of the digital content we are now creating? Steve Knight of the National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ), the lead speaker at one symposium, discussed how NLNZ had gone though all of the phases of documenting the business requirements, analyzing “build versus buy” strategies, explaining and positioning open source/proprietary/open platform solutions to NLNZ directors, training the organization on preservation standards, and through a partnership with Ex Libris, going live with Rosetta - a workflow-based digital preservation infrastructure that provides both access and long-term preservation.

Also of interest was the fact that half of the attendees believed that digital preservation is really just preservation dealing with yet another new information format. (See our previous blog post on this subject at http://commentary.exlibrisgroup.com/2009/05/libraries-choosing-to-end-preservation.html ). Digital preservation (or the ability to guarantee long term access to digital content) is a new discipline in many ways and one that comes with new questions. For instance: a) how do we create a digital preservation policy? b) how do we plan for digital preservation? c) how do we build the business case? d) how do we orchestrate a program and eventually go live with a workflow based solution? During the symposium, answers were discussed among attendees, including such things as best-practices, Web-based resources that exist, and actual experiences.

On the next topic of digital preservation standards, polling results showed that although most institutions are planning to use and follow the OAIS (Open Archival Information Systems) reference model, few had actually been formally trained in OAIS. One could spend days reading the OAIS documentation, but not find answers on how to implement a digital preservation infrastructure, how to build the policy, or how to plan each and every critical step. The good news is that there are now on-site and Web-based training classes ranging from 1 day to multi-day, interactive and/or workshop sessions (for additional information on training, please contact your local Ex Libris office.

The next question showed that nearly all libraries are digitizing and nearly everyone is putting content somewhere, most in some type of repository. Digitization is viewed as a “socially acceptable” way of preserving documents that define your institution’s reputation or possibly defend and protect your institution from legal and regulatory issues. Of course this method of preservation does not address content that is born-digital or the processes needed to authenticate and render all content in the coming decades.

The final polling question showed that many of us are still “flying under the radar” in our respective institutions. Despite all of the hard work and planning going on in the area of digital preservation, only a few of the symposium attendees could say that digital preservation was a stated priority of the senior management in their institution. Although the poll in our symposium showed about half of the attendees had already built or could build a business case for digital preservation, there was only one participant that responded positively to the question; does a written digital preservation policy exist in your institution? It is clear to us all that we need to learn how to express the need for digital preservation as a solid business case.

These symposiums have shown that there is a lot more work for all of us to do in making digital preservation a priority that will get the resources it needs. While some institutions are further along than others, most are just at the beginning stages.

How does your digital preservation initiative compare?

On community and collaboration

One of the concepts that is integral to the URM project here at Ex Libris is that of integrating new models for community and collaboration. Libraries have traditionally been well-grounded in collaboration: reciprocal borrowing of many flavors has existed for decades; consortia of various types have evolved to support resource sharing and to facilitate joint purchasing, particularly of e-resources. Collaboration models have expanded more recently to address the strain on libraries’ physical space through shared off-side storage repositories. And a number of libraries are putting renewed focus on expanding collaboration between libraries and museums/archives, supported by increased federal funding.

Today’s libraries are looking even more closely at extending and expanding collaborative efforts and at new ways of creating and expanding the concept of community within and across their services. We are seeing this already in the implementation of Primo as customers look to engage more closely with users, opening up tagging and reviews for user-contributed content, and focusing on the communities where users are: integrating Primo content on Facebook and other discovery spaces as well as providing apps for the iPhone and other mobile devices.

And, as Jenny Walker has described in other postings, the new bX Recommender Service from Ex Libris, which mines information from customer contributed SFX usage logs, further expands the “power of the networked scholarly community”.

As we develop the URM, we continually look to ways that community and collaboration should be integrated. This starts, of course, with the collaboration we do within the library community. Well before we wrote the first requirements documents or code, Ex Libris was engaging with customers and the community at large. Our interviews with libraries throughout the world and our discussions with customers in small groups have informed URM in more ways than we can count. We don’t always agree of course and we cannot always accommodate all of the good ideas. But, we are listening and looking to work in close collaboration with the community as we develop URM.

We are interested in hearing from you – what are the types of support for collaboration and community you believe are required of a next generation framework such as URM?


Susan

A Productive -- and Exciting -- ELUNA

ELUNA 2009 has almost come and gone – the meeting always seems to go so quickly, probably because I keep so busy over the three days with interesting conversations about what’s happening at Ex Libris and in libraries that use our solutions.

This conference was no exception, especially since we’ve been sharing lots more about our URM plans to very positive response. We kicked the URM “thread” of the conference off with Oren Beit-Arie’s keynote address, which situated the changing world of libraries in the larger context of academic trends. Oren addressed the needs for collaboration within and outside of the library environment, focusing on the opportunities to improve traditional activities, explore “transitional” functionality, and ultimately, to provide transformational services. Tying these to “real-life” examples of URM features, Oren provided a great context for URM discussions throughout the meeting. (For some additional perspective by a conference-goer, check out Simon Bendall’s blog post on the keynote.)

My colleagues, Nettie Lagace and Susan Stearns, and I also had the opportunity to host “subject matter” review sessions throughout the conference. We were pleased to show more details about our URM plans (and even prototypes) in a number of areas – monographic acquisitions, metadata management, electronic resource management, fulfillment services, and more. We were gratified by the level of interest in these sessions – they were all filled to capacity – and happy to get very thoughtful feedback on our work to date. If you weren’t able to attend ELUNA or one of these sessions, never fear – we’ll be offering lots of opportunities to check out our plans and offer your thoughts as our efforts continue. You’ll also see some follow-up to some of the discussions that were initiated in these sessions in the coming weeks here on the blog.

We’re just about to head off for home – only a few more sessions to go, and ELUNA will wrap up for another year. In addition to my suitcase, I’ll be taking home lots of great ideas to incorporate into our thinking, amazing energy from the positive responses to our URM plans, and reinforcement that our vision for next-generation library services will support libraries in both the traditional and transformative ways necessary for future success.

Until next time,

Kathryn