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

bX is launched. The next 'killer app’?

As some of you already know, this week we launched the bX scholarly article recommender service in a public beta mode. Those Ex Libris customers attending the ELUNA user group meeting in Richmond this week may already have seen one of the bX demos and share the sentiments of one twitterer who, after seeing a demo described bX as ”It's Amazon meets JSTOR”, and further urged others to see this in their comment ”Definitely worth checking out.” This follows the recent posting to the SFX listserv by David Walker of CalState libraries ” The new bX service has a real potential to be the next killer app -- SFX was the last killer app, in case you were wondering ;-)” We at Ex Libris are really excited about this, and look forward to many libraries joining the bX community.

For the past several months we have been working with twenty prestigious institutions from around the world that have contributed their SFX usage logs and have worked with us in the testing and further development of this service. This really cool service is now available to all libraries everywhere.

To find out more about the bX service and to subscribe to bX, visit the Ex Libris Web site. Current SFX users can subscribe online via SFXAdmin.

New Framework for a Changing World

In my role as the Director of URM Product Management, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with librarians about the changes afoot in the industry – and about the kinds of back-office managmeent systems that will be necessary for “next-generation libraries”. It’s been an exciting and informative process – at a time of unprecedented change, I’ve seen many examples of how our community is responding with creativity, innovation, and enthusiasm.

In these discussions, I’ve had the opportunity to share Ex Libris’s vision for a next-generation library services framework, which Oren introduced in a previous post, and the URM conceptual model in particular. The model illustrates many of the ways in which the framework is designed to efficiently and effectively manage the full lifecycle of all types of resources, regardless of format or acquisition method, at significantly lower costs than libraries incur today. We’ve recently published a white paper on our URM Resource Center that provides some additional details about the URM, and I’d encourage anyone with an interest in our plans for Unified Resource Management to check this out. In future posts, we’ll share more details about specific aspects of the framework – if a particular aspect of the model piques your interest, let me know and we’ll talk about it here!

As many of you know, Ex Libris has been talking with the library community about URM for quite awhile – formally at user group meetings (including this week in Richmond, Virginia), ALA, and other conferences, and research interviews; informally through our everyday conversations with staff at Ex Libris libraries. Moving forward in the design and development of next-generation services, we’ll use this blog and other channels to continue this process. So, to kick things off:

At the conclusion of the white paper, we note that the changing needs of libraries demand a new framework to support not just new ways of doing today’s tasks, but to enable new kinds of library services and functions. We suggest some emerging opportunities in the white paper, but would also like to invite you to share thoughts about the kinds of new activities on your library’s agenda and the impact these things will have on your current library practices. Specifically:

• How do you see the role of the library in your particular institution changing in the next five years?
• What new initiatives and services do you anticipate offering to your community as a result of these changes?

I’m eager to hear what’s on your mind and look forward to continuing conversations on this topic!

Until next time,

Kathryn

On the air. On the ground.

Next week, Ex Libris’s North American user group, ELUNA, will convene in Richmond, Virginia, where I’ve been asked to give a keynote session on trends affecting next-generation library services and our plans in this realm. This will be a great opportunity to reflect on the transformational change facing not just libraries, but academia as a whole – and to posit some specific ideas about how Ex Libris can bring new solutions to bear in this environment. As I’ve prepared for this session, I’ve taken some time to read again a number of reports on this topic – No Brief Candle, the 2009 EDUCASE/NMC Horizon Report, ARL/CNI’s “Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future” forum, and more – which reinforce once again that it’s no longer a question of whether change is necessary, but how and what we, as a community, must do to achieve that change.

This is a question for which Ex Libris has actively been seeking answers. For several years, we’ve been engaged with the library community and other stakeholders to understand the future role of the academic and research libraries and to respond with solutions that support the processes, services, and data required for that future. In doing so, we’ve worked hard to balance future needs with current requirements, making it possible for libraries to make the necessary revolution in an evolutionary way. Ex Libris quickly understood that, in order to support this transition, libraries needed a new framework, a new model for library services that focuses on the emerging trends and needs of the future while continuing to address the needs of today. As a result, our vision includes three main components: User Services, Management Services, and Transformational Services that take libraries beyond their traditional roles.

Our first stage in the development of new library solutions was Primo, a unified resource discovery and delivery (URD²) platform introduced in 2007. With Primo, we took a critical step in defining the library systems architecture of the future by decoupling the user experience from back-end management of resources. This offers tremendous flexibility in how libraries expose the richness of their collections while also simplifying the discovery process for both local and remote resources. Primo represents an important milestone in a library’s evolution by providing next-generation services to the library’s users.

Now, we are in the process of revolutionizing the library’s administrative, back-office management of all assets -- regardless of their format, type and acquisition method -- with our Unified Resource Management (URM) framework. As a result of many conversations with librarians around the world, we know that the changing environment demands tools that support both “doing things differently” as well as “doing different things”. The URM provides the open and extensible platform necessary to help your library meet current, emerging, and future needs for library management.

Finally, I feel strongly that Ex Libris’s job will not be complete if we don’t expand our focus beyond traditional library tasks; we must continue to support innovation within and transformation of libraries by delivering services that will respond to the core mission of their parent organizations. Already, you can see clear steps we’ve take to develop new solutions in this domain: Rosetta, our digital preservation platform; bX; and more to come.

For those of you headed to ELUNA, I look forward to seeing you – and continuing these discussions – next week. But we also want to take advantage of this new blog environment to broaden the conversation, to share thoughts and to hear your ideas, about next-generation library services. These interesting times present a great opportunity to define and build our future – a future that requires active collaboration between all of the stakeholders in our community for success.