A quote from his current post illustrates this thoughtfullness perhaps a little:

It’s all about argument and counterargument. It’s about listening carefully and reading and writing carefully. 

I really appreciate his step to present some more of the wheelings and dealings op Dutch public libraries to a larger (international) audience. In this wat the rest of the world can have a closer look at (public) library developments in the Netherlands.

Stephen Abram, as could be expected, urged us librarians to wake up. After he started to speak he seemed unstoppable. So now and then he posed a rhetoric question, but hurried on without awaiting any responses. Stephen used quite a bit of exaggeration but I think that was valid approach. He was quite sincere in warning us that it is really five to twelve, or perhaps already four. If we don’t want to become redundant in the future we have focus on our user’s needs rather than our librarian’s needs and adopt Web 2.0 tools in our roster. His list of 25 technologies is a good starting point. These we should master and preferably on a mobile device.

Marshall Breeding was perhaps the biggest contrast in presentation style to the Stephen Abram that you could imagine. Small and shy, but with a clear voice. He asked us first to complete his library web cats survey. The most important trend from his presentation was the increasing popularity of Open Source Systems. He presented very clearly the different shades of openness that exist. Open source is by no means a cheaper alternative than regular integrated library systems. The place to keep an eye on in the near future is the workgroup of OLE

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard radiated library enthusiasm in her presentation. At first she she broke down the fallacy of library knowledge of our users, since most library users are perhaps the Drive in users, that really want to spend the least of time in the library or with the library systems. And this systems needs to be broken down and rebuild from the ground to offer more relevant and better information to meet users needs. That we have to datamine and model our user’s behaviour as closely as possible is not a problem to her. Privacy laws might be prohibitive, though. In her list of examples is Summa of course. Towards the end she pleads for standards, stands and standards of course, since libraries can’t go on this alone, standards will help to cooperate more fully.

The remainder of the afternoon was reserved for Herbert van de Sompel. Perhaps the most interesting presentations of the day, but about applications that are only at the horizon of practical digital libraries today. It is good however that somebody from the digital library research world came to share some of their research with library practitioners. It was Cliford Lynch who once wrote “Digital libraries”: this oxymoronic phrase has attracted dreamers and engineers, visionaries and entrepreneurs, a diversity of social scientists, lawyers, scientists and technicians. And even, ironically, librarians – though some would argue that digital libraries have very little to do with libraries as institutions or the practice of librarianship.“. His point was really to watch the pages of his research groups since a lots will be coming out the coming months.

This year the time keeping and discussion rounds were less strict than last year. A bit of a pity since I really enjoyed those last year. Sylvia van Peteghem did a beautiful round up of the presentations at the end of the day though.

Lynch, C. (2005). Where do we go from here? The next decade for digital libraries. D-Lib Magazine 11(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/lynch/07lynch.html.

An important point he makes is the classical opposition of librarians, who are text based learners to graphical user interfaces. Libraries are equipped for documentary information whereas the whole world is changing towards a multimedia information world. Libraries are on most occasions not yet equipped or prepared for this change in information formats. Where they are shy of graphical user interfaces they are also shy of multimedia.

The point he makes in his extensive introduction is that libraries should interoperate on a global basis, and immerse people in content. All because

“The world is going to change with or without you….
Get ready”

He goes on to explain the importance of the generation y, the younger generation who can multitask, cooperate and are trained at problem solving rather than learning facts. Those are our future users with needs completely different needs. “Who is archiving computer games?” he asks the audience. Simulations are the most important way of teaching in military and defense industries. YouTube movies and Podcasts for research and learning are on many occasions much more effective for learning than textbooks. “Whose study collections include podscasts or vodcasts?” He challenges his audience.

A prediction from Stephen is that an iPod like device will contain all content ever created by 2020, i.e. the complete Web in your pocket. The future is mobile and we better prepare ourselves for this fact. The real question that we should be discussing therefore is what a Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 application should look like in a mobile environment.

Only after about 90 minutes het gets down to his 25 technologies that will transform Academic Libraries in the near future:

1. Mobile
2. Presence management – Twitter
3. Tagging – Delicious
4. Scrapbooking – Zotero, Connotea
5. Personal Homepages
6. Microblogging – Twitter (again)
7. Social content – Wikipedia, Knol
8. Public Social Networking – Orkut, Facebook, MySpace
9. Private Social Networking – Plaxo, LinkedIn, Ning
10. Social Network Integration – f8, opensocial
11. e-Books and devices
12. eLearning – Blackboard, Sakai, AngelLearning
13. XML
14. Cloud Software – Yahoo, Google, Bebo
15. RSS groups and readers – Bloglines, Google Reader
16. iTunes, MP3
17. Podcasts & Screencasts
18. Streaming Media
19. SEO and GIS
20. Federated Search
21. Custom Search
22. Next Generation content
23. DRM
24. up to you
25. Humans as the Competitive Edge

An intended powerpoint, which is actually different from the one presented can be found at Stephens Lighthouse.

The ORE project brings together URI, RDF and Vocabularies. It has all to do with the semantic Web. The beta version of ORE was published June 2008. Best part of that document is the primer to understand what the project is really about. The primer though, will be completely rewritten by the end of September to make it less technical.

More info at:
Van de Sompel, H. and C. Lagoze (2007). Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication CTWatch Quarterly 3(3): 32-40. http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/interoperability-for-the-discovery-use-and-re-use-of-units-of-scholarly-communication/

Really interesting stuff. But still really a little bit beyond most libraries.

Bollen, J., H. van de Sompel, et al. (2008). Towards Usage-based Impact Metrics. Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries: 231-240. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378889.1378928

Federated versus Integrated search
In the definition of Dalsgaard Federated search is something that Metalib does. i.e. Searching different information silos simultaneously and merged the results on a single screen. Federated search was nice solution, but ranking is lously,
With integrated search all content is harvest and indexed within a single system and search by users with any kind of tool. With integrated search you are able to rank in theory much better. However, it will not come easy. You have to balance the relatively “thin” metadata catalogue records and fulltext information. Where will the catalogue record be of a journal like Nature, which is a very important term in the life sciences. It remided me of an article by Tamar Sadeh (2006) which uses different definition than use by Birte.

Federated search is typically associated with:
• Database approach
• Queries
• Based on Z39.50 protocol
• Structured
• “Exact” match

Integrated search is typically associated with:
• Search engine approach
• Natural language
• Large Volume
• Statistical approach

In Denmark they have carried out a data mining experiment with library lending data to develop a recommender system. To their own amazement they privacy policy police did not object, but wherever you are trying to data mine and model data on users privacy problems might crop up.

Interesting point she argues that we need different search systems for different research questions. A common search is a known item lookup, which is completely different from an explorative search on a new subject. Perhaps we need different search engines for these questions, and not expect one system to handle those very different questions.

Realizing that we actually need different search engines, we need to develop the library system as a modular approach.

Towards the end she gets back to the paradigm of Robin Murray: Synthesize, Specialize, Mobilize.

Reference:
Sadeh, T. (2006). Google Scholar versus metasearch systems. High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine(12). http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/12/papers/1/

Christensen-Dalsgaard, B. (2008) The Intelligent catalogue. http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/08carte/publicat/christensendalsgaard.pdf

One of the disruptions in the Integrated Library System (ILS) market in the USA is that many libraries are shifting towards open source (OS) ILS. Most of these decisions taken in favor of the adoption of OS systems are religious decisions. Thus without a proper evaluation of the pros and cons of OS. At the end of the day costs of OS and closed systems are probably equal.

Breeding noted that the investment into Open Source ILS was last year about 10% of the market and will be about 25% of investment this year in North America. The installed base of OS ILS is about 2 to 3%

As examples of OS ILS het mentions

Koha – commercial support from LibLime

Evergreen – Commercial support from Equinox

OPALS – commercial support from Media Flex

NewGenLib – Open Source ILS for the developing world.

Next he goes on to explain the different shades of green that can make a system Open Source. In many cases an open API layer allows libraries to configure and manipulate the system to their liking. Breeding pleads for the development of universal API that can applied towards different ILS. Het talks about the Berkeley Accords.

Rethinking the ILS

Traditional ILS model is not suitable for hybrid libraries where print and digital come together. The classical ILS focuses on Cataloging + Circulation + OPAC + Serials + Acquisitions, whereas nowadays integration includes link resolvers, full text, federated search and Electronic resource management. However the foundations of ILS were carved in stone in the 1965 and still stand their time. We should be pushing the standards constantly. The influence that Google has had on our users is that they expect to do full text searches. Libraries are still worrying about Metadata, users want the data.  

The next generation ILS should be based on a Services Oriented Architecture wich consists of many small granular modules that complete the tasks.

Towards the end het makes mention of the Open Library Environment (OLE) project sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where they are rethinking the next generation of library systems.