eLibrary

Super-size EBSCO ?

Yesterday we had a return visit from EBSCO showing their Resource Discovery solution – along with colleagues from Wolverhampton. It was good to see a live demo and they told us that most of the major publishers were on board – with current exceptions being JSTOR and Proquest Dissertations ; Lexis US Academic (but not yet Lexis UK).

I felt the key question was unanswered though : when we saw the pre-indexed search return interface, one of the limiters was ‘items electronically or physically in the library already‘ : and we wanted to know: how did their Resource Discovery tool know about our subscribed e-collections? Was it from our catalogue (where it took regular updates from) or our link resolver knowledgbase ? EBSCO may well answer this later but I was disappointed they couldn’t confirm where the data was being sourced from. It made think that for all of these products – sorry for the image – ‘opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings’: ie until the user gets to our ’stuff’.

The quality of the link resolver becomes key – after all Serials Solutions  seem to be building their Summon case on 360 Link, not 360 Search – and the nature of the metadata agreements that allow all this nice sharing of thin and not so thin data between publishers to go on. For the time being EBSCO seem to have got deals with nearly everyone – I just hope they don’t carry their reputation for signing exclusive deals into the resource discovery marketplace.

Also I think their interface looks like it needs to go on a diet…maybe EDS version 2.0 (due out in June 2010) will be a bit more easy on the eye.

image credit :jblyberg

Primo 3

We recently had a demo of Primo 3 and it was interesting to see how quickly new developments and functionality had been added since the last demo in November

The issue of coverage is still a concern so it was good to hear about the Primo Publisher Program to encourage publishers to allow access to content. The success of these massive indexes is on the content they contain and with products from publishers such as proquest & ebsco I was keen to see what Primo could offer.

One of the most interesting features of Primo was the integration with the library catalogues. In the demo we saw availabilty information of items & the option to place a request from the Primo interface. I especially like the function of limiting your results to only view items which are shown as on the shelf. This however raised an interesting  question of whether a sepearate catalogue interface was really needed.  I can see a real benefit in reducing the number of front end interfaces to maintain although the key is if it can develiver the appropiate functionality. They have this functionality working with Aleph, Voyager and Unicorn to date.

Our next step is to try and talk to Primo customers and find out more about thier experience with the product.

Resource discovery: demonstration by EBSCO

Following on from our autumn programme of visits, EBSCO are making a return visit to demonstrate their EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) which was launched over Christmas – this time the demonstration will be in the Library Teaching Room, Mary Seacole Library on Wednesday 3^rd March, at 2pm.

Look forward to seeing you there !

image credit: NASA

Being ‘tickled’ by resource discovery

Ken Dodd sculpture at Liverpool Lime St station

We visited Liverpool University library today and talked to Terry, Roy and Dave about their experience of search tools, Summon and Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS).

Liverpool have been beta testing Summon for approx 9 months and have just recently begun beta testing Ebsco Search Discovery http://www.liv.ac.uk/Library/e-library/discover.html. Like us, and many libraries, they are looking to provide a ‘quick, simultaneous access to the Library’s quality-assured print and electronic resources’

Having had the sales pitch from the vendors we were keen to see the other side of the coin and hear about a live implementation. We were fortunate that Liverpool were happy to share their experience of Summon to date and this presentation, delivered at a recent JIBS usergroup -  ‘Holy grail or leaky cup’, provides a great summary.

The look & feel and speed of search results  in Summon were definite positives. However a key issue was with the content in terms of currency, quality, coverage and linking to the full text (via SFX).

Liverpool are just about to start beta testing Ebsco Discovery Service and intial thoughts have been positive. In terms of content as Ebsco were able to clearly identify what resources they have access to index. However the look & feel of the interface is more cluttered.

Liverpool found the implementation of both Summon and the Ebsco product very straightforward and both are hosted. It seemed that there was more opportunity of easy customisation with Ebsco. One of the features I like about Ebsco is the possibility of allowing searches of only selected resources, this could be used to provide more targeted services to groups of users.

I was disappointed to note that discovery tools were facing the same issues federated search encountered at the beginning such as a more US focus to the coverage,  not all publishers allowing access to the data etc.  I had hoped we would have learned more  from that experience.

It seemed clear that the success of these tools is about how much of  the libraries collection is able to be harvested, but as noted in an earlier post, Ebsco indicated that publishers would be unwilling to allow access to their data. I think it is worrying to see these signs of exclusivity between the publishers and it erodes a potentially valuable service.

What I took away from the day was to focus more on our collection, I am keen that we take a close look at our resources and confirm which can be effectively searched and results displayed within these tools.

I am also interested to find out more about how our users want to find this information, while I appreciate that everyone wants the simplicity of Google I am unsure how this can be provided with more complicated data such as statistics, reports, images etc.  I am hoping someone has the answer.

Many thanks to Terry, Roy and Dave for such a useful day

Linked Data – turning the web into a database

Last week I went to an event that looked in some detail at the Talis Platform, now emerging after 5 years of development as a semantic web environment that offers a hosting and development infrastructure for data owners and publishers, and for developers who want to build applications using that data.

The Platform is designed to encourage sharing of the linked data that will underpin the next generation of web applications and data services. To paraphrase Ian Davis, CTO at Talis, currently the web is a universal information space for documents; linked data will make the web into a database.

Last week the UK Government launched the open data project, which seeks to open up the vast quantities of non-private public-sector data stored on government computers. The idea is to encourage innovative re-use of the data; there are nearly 3000 data-sets available for developers to build mashups with and interesting applications are already starting to  appear; examples mentioned in a recent BBC blog include a school finder which lets you search local schools ranked by Oftsed score, and FillThatHole, which uses ONS Census geography data to facilitate the reporting of potholes and other road hazards. The Talis Platform is providing the hosting and search services behind the site.

Library & Learning Resources are also using the Platform, in our case to deliver the latest incarnation of the library catalogue.

Prism 3 will be hosted by Talis and delivered to us using the Software as a Service model; because the data and the application are both on the Talis Platform, rather than on servers here at our own data centre this makes Prism 3 an example of what’s often called cloud computing.

Our bibliographic data has been copied into a self contained data store within the Platform and converted from MARC into RDF, which is the data format for linked data (if your inner geek wants to find out more about RDF then here’s a place to start). By utilising data held in other data stores within the platform Prism 3 will be able to deliver enrichments such as images of book jackets to give the catalogue a lot more visual appeal for users.

There should be a basic version of our Prism 3 up soon for you to play with, so please watch this space.

image credit: Thomas Lennon Photographic Collection, Powerhouse Museum

So close, yet so long.

Two seemingly straightforward requests received in as many days, produced groans when I first knew about them. Now, I’m not starting a post Christmas slump, one from which I would be unlikely to emerge until the clocks go forward at the end of March.  The requests themselves don’t require a feat of mental gymnastics such as that needed to consolidate the different spellings or misspellings that we have for Russian authors in our catalogue. So where’s the problem.

The requests were: how many items were returned yesterday and what transactions were processed at a Campus Library around a particular time on an afternoon in December.  Straightforward certainly, however frustration arises, because for these requests it takes so long to get the data out of the Library Management System. The report ends up grinding through nearly 21 million loans; and can’t be run on our live system for fear of bringing it to a halt.

I’ve worked in Libraries for the past 5½ years and before that I worked for a small company producing Business software.  Even back in the dim distant past of the early 90’s, up to the minute sales and transaction reports could be produced by end-users without any impact on the live system. The slowness of the current reporting is due to database design not just system speed. I know, Libraries have very different demands and pressures from commercial companies, but it is still galling to know that I could have produced equivalent figures in a couple of minutes, when mobile phones were still the size of a brick (or two).

Creating Future Proof Graduates

Birmingham City University

Last week I dropped in on the ‘Creating Future Proof Graduates’ exhibition which was showcasing the 8 resources created to help students identify and prepare for problems when in the ‘real world’. Birmingham City University  was awarded  the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) project in 2007, which includes funding from HEFCE, and this exhibition is the first of the projects to reach the dissemination stage.

Who, What Where

The resources include a board game, an animation, online course material etc. One of the resources was created by some of the library’s Learning & Teaching team -  Who, What, Where.

This is a short course which can be accessed independently providing information to help students fully prepare for job interviews.

During the exhibition John, Carol and Christiana were at hand to talk to delegates and demonstrate the course. There was a lot of interest in the course including discussion of possible additional resources, linking with other communities etc. Personally I think this is a really good reference resource and it also highlights the value libraries provide in supporting students both in study and personal development .

The delegates all recieved a ‘compendium’ of resources and they are  available online.

Middlemash

We were pleased to host the third mashed library event on Monday 30th November, Middlemash. Details about the day and presentations are on the event blog.

The elibrary team have been busy organising the event and it was great to recieve such positive feedback, we wanted to say a huge thank you to all the speakers & delegates for making it such an succesful day. Thank you also to the sponsors, especially Ex Libris who provided the refreshements (including plenty of cake)

The morning was filled with talks from a variety of people. Tamar Sedeh from Ex Libris started the day talking about how Ex Libris have been working with customers and the El Commons platform allowing people to share code and work collaboratively.

This was followed by a talk by Mark van Harmelen who highlighted the importance of user feedback and testing in all design. He illustrated the importance of paper prototyping – sketching out the idea on paper – which is always a great starting point.

We then had 3 case studies from librarians in HE about projects they have worked on having attended the previous 2 mashed library events. It was great to hear how they have developed their ideas and the tools they used to achieve this.

In the afternoon fortified by lunch and more cake the delegates had the opportunity to attend workshops on Yahoo Pipes, adding JUICE extensions to the catalogue (this could be adding book jackets, maps etc) and looking at the possibilities of using google maps to create library floor plans.

It was an enjoyable day and I was really pleased to meet so many enthusiastic & talented librarians from across the UK.  I came away from the day with a number of ideas to explore and it’s been really interesting hearing about some of the ideas that delegates have been working on since the event.  We have also been thinking about holding a smaller regional event to colloborate with colleagues further.

ebook roadshow @ De Montfort Leicester

We were kindly invited to participate in an ebook roadshow organised by Mitchell Dunkley at De Montfort Leicester. The roadshow gave library staff & academics the opportunity to meet with vendors/publishers and discover more about the available content, pricing models, search features etc. Chris and I also pitched up, armed with statistics and photos from the ebook world tour, to provide information on Birmingham City University library experience with ebooks.

We had a very enjoyable and informative day, it was great to share our experience with the library staff and discuss the common issues. It gave me the opportunity to get a better picture of our ebook collection and identify the challenges we face.

As well as share our experience I also had the opportunity to talk to some of the publishers, find out more about De Montfort’s  institutional repository, DORA and chat to the systems librarian who showed us a page  providing direct search to other library catalogues and maps of their location.

This roadshow also inspired me to think about providing a similar event for our library staff to meet some of the publishers who provide our electronic resources.

JISC Federated Access Management Conference

I recently attended a useful JISC conference entitled Federating the next generation which looked at access management using tools such as Shibboleth and Open Athens to authenticate logins to publisher resources. There was also strong representation from Eduserv Athens – for example their new release of OpenAthens LA 2.0 includes not only a Shibboleth install package but also a single-sign on to Google Apps for each institution domain – free to existing subscribers!

Some librarians reported workflow issues when they switched from Athens to Shibboleth (it seemed for one institution that their IT department had simply installed it on a server and left the library to do all the testing of links!). Other libraries reported a smooth switch over and that they were continuing to use Athens to support non-standard users so adopting a hybrid approach.

Many publishers could not agree on standard login, and some were still not ready; a common solution for libraries was EZProxy which allow off-campus access to products that did not offer either Athens or Shibboleth access.

Successful approaches to identity management were obviously relevant here :  ‘Unless institutions have a much better grasp of who its external users are, its almost impossible for the library to sort out‘  - was one key quote for me. Apparently a Shibboleth server install can be done in 12 mins –according to one speaker – so its not just about how to set it up but how to use it eg who is logging on, what format/syntax of ID they are using, and where they are logging on from: these are the things that will impact the student experience the most, especially as commercial and educational applications of federated identity may converge more in the future. 

JISC have put all the presentations up at http://sites.google.com/site/jiscfam/ and these will be added to the main conference site too in due course.