Librarians: gatekeepers or sneck-lifters?

I recently attended the JIBS-Eduserv Seminar, ‘Where next for resource licensing?’ – and it struck me that unfairly or not, librarians have always attracted the label of ‘gatekeepers’. The issues discussed here (live blogged on the day) were no exception. We have to deal with an increasing fragmentation in our user base, and at a time of budget cuts, universities will continue to recruit from every where and anywhere just to pay the bills. Several speakers including Jenny Carroll from Eduserv  (‘It’s all a question of scale – joint initiatives in HE institutions’) and Louis Cole from Kingston (“Thorny issues in licensing: an institution’s view”) covered the increasing number of partnerships, validations, alumni, walk-in users,’ non-doms’ etc that are now part of our licensing landscape – and the contradictions that ensue from these.

The technologies for managing these different users is already here : in his talk Ed Dee from EDINA  told us how Shibboleth authentication can be exploited for granularity – although interestingly he said that its potential was under-developed : not many institutions had gone beyond releasing basic attributes.  Matt Durant from Bath Spa took us through a demo of how Open Athens LA 2.0 would manage differing user-groups.  He focussed on the student experience, which was overlooked in my view by some of the designs of pop-up screens for e-journal articles shown by Mark Bide, from EDItEUR in his presentation on machine-readable licences.

But expressing complex licenses in XML isn’t easy : though the forthcoming JISC Collections’ online Licence Comparison and Analysis Tool will definitely help. And it also struck me that the further removed some of these user groups are from our home brand, the questions ‘What is Athens, (etc.) how do I log-in’ will be naturally even more insistent.  Once upon a time, for most a students a library was just a building, but that model is challenged not least  by the rise of mobile devices. Owen Stephens’s keynote speech Where are you: Does physical location matter in the digital world? showed how the old definitions of ‘walk-in user’ may need rethinking – and I would agree it is a confusing concept. What does walk-in really mean when most institutions have a VPN or use EZProxy to emulate their institutional proxy? When the numbers of students with smartphones wanting access to our services will soon start to take off?  When those courses who ask for ‘walk-in’ are often many miles away?’

You might be wondering what all this has got to do with the picture alongside – this particular tipple (which I can warmly recommend to you by the way) was named after ‘a man’s last sixpence, allowing him to lift the pub’s door latch and purchase a pint, whereupon he hopes to make enough friends that they may offer to buy him further rounds’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennings_Brewery).

A wise investment methinks –using limited funds to allow us to discover more resources to share with a wider audience is better than barring the door to that audience altogether.

UKSG 2010 : two tribes ?

desk fan from UKSG

Why my title ‘two tribes’ ? Some of us might remember the Frankie Goes to Hollywood video of ‘Two Tribes Go to War‘ – and there certainly were two ‘tribes’ of librarians and publishers in evidence upstairs on the conference platform, (whilst downstairs the real horse-trading was being done over coffee!). But there have been other more complex divisions : a librarian called Meredith Farkas blogged recently on whether EBSCO was the new ‘evil empire’ over its practice of exclusivity (’you can’t have the journal if you’re not in the club’ approach) – a practice which earlier this year drove Gale/Cengage to publish an open letter to EBSCO.

A time of war is usually a time of increased technological consumption and certainly the librarian-technologists were out in inspirational force: Richard Wallis (Talis) flagged up early on in his talk that that the ’student doesn’t care where resources come from’ & we should be using technology to bring the resource directly to them; a theme taken up by Tony Hirst (Open University) and Lucy Power(Oxford Internet Institute) as they showed how researchers use social networks and other Web 2.0 tools for resource discovery.

Looking ahead, Richard Padley also pointed the way to the benefits of the ‘semantic web‘ of open, linked data (highlighted by the recent release of free government data – an event significant enough to draw comment from EDINA, who in a recent press release seem to be holding back details of their new DIGIMAP deal whilst they absorb the impact of this.) In this session, Richard spoke tellingly for me about how commercial pressures could lead to an  ’arms race’ as each publisher creates ‘big silos of content’, with a different interface.

In terms of resource discovery, though they are all looking much the same: from what I saw of  Proquest’s new interface (for all CSA and Proquest databases) it adopts the standard ‘one search to rule them all’ ; facets down the left and a googlised ‘did you mean’ search.  The market is still dominated by the big deals, the big aggregators & their even bigger business lawyers. Ted Bergstrom spoke of the case last year when Elsevier attempted to block public release of license terms by taking Washington State University in court. Closer to home, we’ve had Murdoch’s paywall leading to titles being taken off Lexis- Nexis. It’s a shame Denis Potter is no longer with us – I would have like to have heard him respond : he was good on Murdoch.

Where are librarians in all of this? Do we retreat to the warm, comfortable bunker of the catalogue cave, to measure, count and classify? Sue White and Graham Stone gave an excellent presentation on how they had used statistics at the University of Huddersfield to ‘maximise use of their library resources’ – showing how good results correlate to good use of e-resources. One starting point for Huddersfield was their logins to ExLibris’ Metalib (doing this sort of stuff is so much easier when an institution has a login-point for e-resources).

There were other useful debates on metrics – and it was said more than once that statistics achieve a kind of ‘fetish-like status’. Hugh Look (Rightscom) drew on  Claude Levi-Strauss (the ‘father of modern anthropology’), and linked his theories of the  ’raw and the cooked’ in early societies to the ‘unmeasured’ and ‘measured’ in the world of  library metrics. He spoke of the ‘rise of the managerial class who are the main beneficiary of a measurement culture’.

It struck me that the losers in any such Cold War are the students : and the few sessions that focussed on their experience were immensely valuable. Alison Brock from the Open University looked at e-book readers – though even here the publisher’s favourite weapon  (propietary format control: you can download library content on a PC not on a Sony reader : put me in mind of why I don’t like Apple but that’s another story). The other breakout session I attended was from Philippa Sheail – a brilliant reality check: how the student doesn’t really care where this stuff comes from , and who publishes it – they just want access.

So is the case –  as Winston Churchill said – more recently in Doctor Who – of  ’KBO ‘ , doing nothing? We like the Daleks – they are our friends ? The last word went to satire and to Marc Abraham’s presentation on the IgNoble prizes – one of their ‘winners’ for the Peace Prize managed to get the following published in the Journal of Forensic Medicine for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle : “Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull? “.

Note the publisher. But before you click on the PDF, (isn’t that helpful, that the link to it comes up first) – you probably won’t get in. We’re not in that particular club.  Or, put it another way : that journal is not in our collection. It’s not the first paywall we’ve seen and it won’t be the last.

As Frankie says, ‘When two tribes go to war/A point is all you can score’.

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

Resource discovery: demonstration by Innovative Interfaces

 The 4th of the demos we’ve organised  from resource discovery system suppliers takes place on Friday November 6th at 10:30, when Innovative Interfaces will be talking about their Encore platform, together with their federated search tool ResearchPro.

For examples of Encore sites, see University of Glasgow library’s page ; and also University of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Please come and join us for more tea, coffeee, biscuits and another peek at what resource discovery for our students might look like in the future.

Resource discovery: a new twist ?

Previously we have seen two different solutions to the problem of Resource Discovery:  1) pre-built ‘connectors’ built to allow a federated search across our electronic resources  and 2) a discovery tool that uses metadata that is pre-indexed from the publishers, and also incorporates our local catalogue data. Exlibris say that ideally we would need both solutions; Serials Solutions say that we can run 2) without the need for 1).

I thought the demo from EBSCO last week was interesting as their comments were made from the position of a subscription agent . They cast doubt on publishers’ willingness to open up their data for harvesting – and said that libraries would always need both solutions in place.

What will Innovative say when they come and see us on the 6th November?

image credit: meknits

Resource discovery: demonstration by EBSCO

The 3rd of the demos we’ve organised  from resource discovery system suppliers takes place on Friday October 23rd at 10:30, when EBSCO will be talking about their Discovery Service, together with their federated search tool EBSCOhost Integrated Search

Please come and join us for tea, coffeee, biscuits and another peek at what resource discovery for our students might look like in the future

image credit: alef

Resource Discovery: a brief summary of what we’ve seen so far…

signpost

We are now halfway through our Autumn demos and we’ve had two interesting presentations so far, Robert Bley from Ex Libris showed us Primo and MetaLib, and Richard Burckitt and Richard Illingworth from Serials Solutions demonstrated Summon.

Both presentations highlighted research showing that readers understand and appreciate that resources offered by the Library are both high quality and relevant. The problem we have is that our readers struggle with the complexity of the systems we provide to lead them to those resources. Although the Library wins hands down over internet search engines as a credible, trustworthy and accurate source of information, students still turn to Google because it is so much more convenient and easy to use than the bewildering array of interfaces that we confront them with. There is a pressing need for us to make premium grade and expensive library approved content available from a single starting point; an interface that matches the expectations of today’s readers.

Both companies offer products that are a significant improvement on what we currently have, and Google is an obvious influence. Primo and Summon both allow searches to be carried out across a range of library controlled and commercial subscription resources. They both offer a single search box, an advanced search option, groups of facets as a means of refining searches and filtering results, “did you mean” functionality and enhanced content in the form of book jackets, tagging, reader reviews. etc.

Behind the scenes the two are quite different – Primo builds a local index with metadata from library controlled resources; the catalogue, digital repositories, content management systems etc, but relies on a federated search engine (i.e. Metalib) to search across commercial e-resources that the Library subscribes to. A single interface allows readers to search either the local data sources, or the commercial database and full text journal services, but the two searches are separated because federated search tends to deliver results slowly.

Summon from Serials Solutions uses a single index that merges local metadata with metadata harvested from commercial publishers. Readers search one index that combines all of the resources they are entitled to access (or, more accurately, the resources that Serials Solutions have been able to index). The search can also be expanded to cover everything in the Serials Solutions index, regardless of whether the Library subscribes to the resource. The results are delivered at Google like speed as the search is pointing at one index rather than multiple targets.

Interestingly, ExLibris are also in the process of negotiating with publishers to harvest metadata directly into a central index, they say that coverage isn’t wide enough yet to do away with the need for a federated search engine, but that over time reliance on federated search will inevitably decline. Serials Solutions on the other hand claim that they no longer need federated search because their comprehensive central index can provide 95% and better coverage of a Library’s resources.

Both products are offered on a subscription basis; Primo is available both as a hosted service or as a locally managed application, while Summon is only available via the Software as a Service model.

The turnout for both sessions was good, but we’d really love to know what you thought of what you’ve seen so far.

image credit: Dutch Nationaal Archief