Dilettante’s Ball

I have been following a thread on the VuFind-Tech list regarding the project’s endorsement of Jangle to provide the basis of the ILS plugin architecture for that project.  It’s not an explicit mandate, just a pragmatic decision that if work is going in to creating a plugin for VuFind, it would make more sense (from an open source economics point of view) if that plugin was useful to more projects than just VuFind.  More users, more interest, more community, more support.

The skepticism of Jangle is understandable and expected.  After all, it’s a very unorthodox approach to library data, seemingly eschewing other library initiatives and, at the surface, seems to be wholly funded by a single vendor’s support.

And, certainly, Jangle may fail.  Just like any other project.  Just like VuFind.  Just like Evergreen.  Any new innovative project brings risk.  More important than the direct reward of any of these initiatives succeeding is the disruption they bring to the status quo.  Instead of what they directly bring to the table, what do they change about how we view the world?

Let’s start with Evergreen.  Five years ago I sat in a conference room at Emory’s main library while Brad LaJeunesse and Jason Etheridge (this predated PINES hiring Mike Rylander and Bill Erickson) told us that they were ditching Unicorn and building their own system.  I, like the others in the room, Selden Deemer, Martin Halbert, smiled and nodded and when they left I (Mr. Library Technology Polyanna) turned to the others and said that I liked their moxie, but it was never going to work.  Koha was the only precedent at the time, and, frankly, it seemed like a toy.

Now where are we?  Most of the public libraries in Georgia using Evergreen, a large contingency from British Columbia migrating, and a handful of academic libraries either live or working towards migration.  Well, I sure was wrong.

The more significant repercussion of PINES going live with Evergreen was that it cast into doubt our assumptions of how our relationship with our integrated library system needed to work.  Rather than the library waiting for their vendor to provide whatever functionality they need or want, they can instead, implement it themselves.  While it’s unrealistic for every library to migrate to Evergreen or Koha, these projects have brought to light the lack of transparency and cooperation in the ILS marketplace.

Similarly, projects like VuFind, Blacklight and fac-back-opac prove that by pulling some off-the-shelf non-library-specific applications and cleverly using existing web services (like covers from Amazon) that we can cheaply and quickly create the kinds of interfaces we have been begging from our vendors for years.  It is unlikely that all of these initiatives will succeed, and the casualties will more likely be the result of the technology stack they are built upon rather than any lack of functionality, the fact that they all appeared around the same time and answer roughly the same question, shows that we can pool our resources and build some pretty neat things.

To be fair, the real risk taker in this arena was NC State.  They spent the money on Endeca and rolled out the interface that wound up changing the way we looked at the OPAC.  The reward of NCSU’s entrepreneurialism is that we now have projects like VuFind and its ilk.  Very few libraries can afford to be directly rewarded by NC State’s catalog implementation, but with every library that signs on with Encore or Primo, III and Ex Libris owe that sale to a handful of people in Raleigh.  You would not be able to download and play with VuFind if NC State libraries had worried too much about failure.

Which then brings me to Jangle.  The decision to build the spec on the Atom Publishing Protocol has definitely been the single most criticism of the project (once we removed the confusing, outdated wiki pages about Jangle being an Rails application), but there has been little dialogue as to why it wouldn’t work (actually, none).  The purpose of Jangle is to provide an API for roughly 95% of your local development needs with regards to your library services.  There will be edge cases, for sure, and Jangle might not cover them.  At this point, it’s hard to tell.  What is easier to tell, however, is that dwelling on the edge cases does absolutely nothing to address the majority of needs.  Also, the edge cases are mainly library-internal-specific problems (like circulation rules).  A campus or municipal IT person doesn’t particularly care about these specifics when trying to integrate the library into courseware or some e-government portal.  They just want a simple way to get the data.

This doesn’t mean that Jangle is solely relegated to simple tasks, however.  It just is capable of scaling down to simple use cases.  And that’s where I hope Jangle causes disruption whether or not it is ultimately the technology that succeeds.  By leveraging popular non-library-specific web standards it will make the job of the systems librarian or the external developer easier, whether it’s via AtomPub or some other commonly deployed protocol.

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I was reading Brian’s appeal for more Emerils in the library world (bam!), noticed Steven Bell’s comment (his blog posting was a response to one by Steven in the first place) and it got me thinking.

First off, I don’t necessarily buy into Brian’s argument.  Maybe it’s due to the fact that he’s younger than me, but my noisy, unwanted opinions aren’t because I didn’t get a pretty enough pony for my sixteenth birthday or because I saw Jason Kidd’s house on Cribs ™ and want to see my slam dunk highlights on SportsCenter on my 40″ flat screens in every bathroom.  It’s because I feel I have something to offer libraries and I genuinely want to help affect change.  Really, I know this is what motivates Brian, too, despite his E! Network thesis, because we worked together and I know his ideas.

Brian doesn’t have to worry about his fifteen minutes coming to a close anytime soon.  Although at first blush it would appear that the niche he has carved out for himself is potentially flash-in-the-pan-y (Facebook, Second Life, library gaming, other Library 2.0 conceits), the motivation for why he does what he does is anything but.  He is really just trying to meet users where they are, on their terms, to help them with their library experience.

Technologies will change and so, too, will Brian, but that’s not the point.  He’ll adapt and adjust his methods to best suit what comes down the pike, as it comes down the pike (proactively, rather than reactively) and continue to be a vanguard in engaging users on their own turf.  More importantly, though, I think he can continue to be a voice in libraries because he works in a library and if you have some creative initiative it’s very easy to stand out and make yourself heard.

Brian and I used joke about the library rock star lifestyle:  articles, accolades, speaking gigs, etc.  A lot of this comes prettily easily, however.  If you can articulate some rational ideas and show a little something to back those ideas up, you can quickly make a name for yourself.  Information science wants visionary people (regardless of whether or not they follow that leader) and librarians want to hear new ideas for how to solve old problems.  Being a rock star is pretty easy, being a revolutionary is considerably harder.

I made the jump from library to vendor because I wanted to see my ideas affect a larger radius than what I could do at a single node.  It has been an interesting adjustment and I’m definitely still trying to find my footing.  It has been much, much more difficult to stand out because I am suddenly surrounded by a bunch of people that much are smarter than me, much better developers than me, and have more experience applying technology on a large scale.  This is not to say that I haven’t worked with brilliant people in libraries (certainly I have, Brian among them), but the ratio has never been quite like this.  Add to the fact that being a noisy, opinionated voice within a vendor has its immediate share of skeptics and cynics (who are the ‘rock stars’ in the vendor community?  Stephen Abram?  Shoot me.), I may find myself falling into Steven Bell’s dustbin.  Then again, I might be able to eventually influence the sorts of changes that inspired me to make the leap in the first place.  I can do without the stardom in that case.

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Can anyone give a rational explanation as to why a job with a description like this:

DESCRIPTION: Provides technology and computer support for the Vanderbilt Library. The major areas of responsibility include developing, maintaining and assisting in the enhancement of interfaces to web-enabled database applications (currently implemented in perl, PHP, and MySQL). The position also helps establish and maintain guidelines (coding standards, version control, etc.) for the development of new applications in support of library patrons, staff, and faculty across the university. This position will also provide first line backup for Unix system administration. Other duties and assignments will be negotiated based on the successful candidate’s expertise, team needs, and library priorities.

would require an MLS? Library experience? Sure, I can see why that would be desirable. While I find it ridiculous when many libraries require an MLS for what is essentially an IT manager, Vandy is upping the ante here and requiring it for a developer/jr. sysadmin.

I guess that’s a way to prop up the profession.

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If YPOW, like MPOW, is an Endeavor Voyager site, you’ve got some decisions ahead.  Francisco Partners, naturally, would like you to migrate to Aleph, and I have no doubt that Ex Libris is, as I write this, busily working on a means to make that easy for Voyager libraries to do.  But ILS migrations are painful, no matter how easy the backend process might be.  There’s staff training,  user training, managing new workflows, site integration; lots of things to deal with.  Also, your functionality may not be a 1:1 relationship to what you currently have.  How do you work around services you depended upon?

Since soon our contracts with Endeavor Information Systems will be next to worthless, I propose, Voyager customers, that we take ownership of our systems.  For the price of a full Oracle (or SQL Server? — does Voyager support other RDBMSes?) license  (many of us already have this), we can get write permissions to our DB and make our own interfaces.  We wouldn’t need to worry about staff clients (for now), since we already have cataloging, circulation, acquisitions, etc. modules that work.  When we’re ready for different functionality, however, we can create a new middleware (in fact, I’m planning to break ground on this in the next two weeks) to allow for web clients or, even better, piggyback on Evergreen’s staff clients and let somebody else do the hard work.  If we had native clients in the new middleware, a library could use any database backend they wanted (just migrate the data from Oracle into something else).  The key is write access to the database.

By taking ownership of our ILS, we can push developments we want, such as NCIP, a ‘Next Gen OPAC’, better link resolver integration, better metasearch integration, etc. without the pain of starting all over again (with potentially the same results, who is to say that whatever you choose as an ILS wouldn’t eventally get bought and killed off, as well?).  Putting my money (or lack thereof) where my mouth is, I plan on migrating Fancy Pants to use such a backend (read only db access, for now, we still have a support contract, after all).  I’m calling this project ‘Bon Voyage’.  After reading Birkin’s post on CODE4LIB, I would like to make a similar service for Voyager that would basically take the place of the Z39.50 server and access to the database.  Fancy Pants wouldn’t be integrated into Bon Voyage, it would just be another client (since it was always only meant as a stopgap, anyway).

What we’ll have is a framework for getting at the database backend (it’d be safe to say this will be a rails project) with APIs to access bib, item, patron, etc. information.  Once the models are created, it will be relatively simple to transition to ‘write’ access when that becomes necessary.  Making a replacement for WebVoyage would be fairly trivial once the architecture is in place.  Web based staff clients would also be fairly simple.  I think EG staff client integration wouldn’t be too hard since it would just be an issue of outputting our data to something the EG clients want (JSON, I believe) and translating the client’s reponse.  That would need to be investigated more, however (I’m on paternity leave and not doing things like that right now

Would anybody find this useful? 
It seems the money we spend on an ILS could be better spent elsewhere.  I don’t think this would be a product we could distribute outside of the the current Voyager customer base (at least, not until it was completely native… maybe not even then- we’d have to work this out with Francisco Partners, I guess), but I think that that is big enough to be sustainable on its own.

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Library Geeks #4 is out. I’m back (instead of being the ‘Poltergeek’ of episode 3), and Dan set this one up in kind of a neat way. He certainly leads and guides the dialogue, but it’s much more of a roundtable and informal discussion. No doubt this is largely due to the fact we’re all pretty good friends. Still, I learned a lot about Ed that I didn’t know — pretty amazing since we hang out every day and work on so much together.

Bobby McFerrin, eat your heart out.

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I have been thinking a lot this week about how libraries are skirting ever closer to a precipice they generally refuse to acknowledge.

While certainly a cynic, I’m not generally a Cassandra, so before proclaiming last rites on the library, I wanted to make sure I had thought about this some. This was probably spurred on by the “Murder MARC” thread on NGC4Lib.

And I got to thinking about travel agents.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, it was nigh onto impossible to book a trip anywhere without a travel agent. My mother worked part-time for a travel agent; travel agents were everywhere. It seemed as much a part of travelling as does a real estate agent seem part of home buying today. It’s technically possible to work without them, but life is going to be a whole lot easier if you do. Travel agents held the keys to your vacation; you were at the mercy of where, when and how much your vacation was to be.

Then, sometime during the dot-com blitz, up popped sites such as Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. Suddenly, the consumer controlled his or her own travel. The traveller could waste as much time as he or she wanted looking for the perfect getaway; setting up fare watches to places they might randomly want to go; researching the hotel on the receiving end. All this without hassle of somebody trying arrange the trip for them. Sure, you might not have found the best rate or gotten a free meal thrown in at your destination, but the merits outweighed the costs. You began to know fewer and fewer travel agents.

For a long time librarians viewed Amazon.com and the other online booksellers as their primary competition. It made sense; both parties were hawking roughly the same physical wares. For a very long time, booksellers and libraries have coexisted. There was an understanding of the differences between the two models and, despite attempts to make the library catalog act more like Amazon, the market for each seemed fairly well intact.

Search engines, however, were happy to freely give away information indiscriminently. As the Googles and Yahoos indexed more and more content and the information grew freer and freer, libraries began to seem more antiquated and backwards in comparison. With more and more information available — preprints, Open Access, book digitization efforts — the need for specific content began to wane. Users began to lose interest working with arcane brokers of information when the information they were finding on their own met their needs. Librarians, in response, chastized the users’ choices and maintained that a steady diet of hard work and piety was the only way to achieve scholarly salvation. Dogmatic adherence to preservation of metadata took precedence over improving the user’s ability navigate and discover. After all, we know better than the user how to find the best fares, right?

I’m not a Cassandra, I’m really not. Disruptive technologies can lead to revolutionary changes, after all.

However, these thoughts came to a boil today. I have been given a lot of criticism about the way I rely on the search engines to provide a lot of functionality in the Ümlaut. How, despite the money we pay for our licensed resources, I still prominently display free web search results.

The fact of the matter is that it’s impossible for me include our precious resources for anything useful, while including Google, Yahoo and Amazon was a piece of cake. The best I can hope to give our users from our collection are links to lists of databases or subject guides; without considerable work on my part and the librarians all I can hope to get them is a generic link to all of our databases or a list of subject guides. With the search engines I can at least narrow down the information as to be somewhat useful. And if it’s not? They don’t have to use it. There’s a link to the library, that’s one link away from the databases or subject guides.

At this point it’s important for us to empower the user; not with arcane searching techniques in hard to find resources, but by leveraging our systems so they can be integrated easily into wherever the user is looking and by exposing our content and services in ways that fit into the user’s sphere of control and comfort. If we don’t, the user will still find information that is ‘good enough’ for their needs and more will be added every day. Then, we’ll not only have lost our control, but our relevance as well.

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Every library I have worked at has had an uneasy caste system between the faculty and staff. While I understand this to extent, this delineation is used without rhyme or reason much of the time. The implication is that this means the librarians are treated as “career professionals” and the staff is merely “the help” (more on this in a minute).

I was pleasantly surprised to see the University of Iowa waive the MLS requirement for their current “Director of Information Technology” job posting (MS Word Document).

The University of Iowa Libraries seeks a creative, experienced professional to lead our information technology (IT) operations. Building on the Libraries’ current capabilities, the Director will provide innovative leadership in the use of technology to deliver information resources and services to the Libraries’ user communities. The Director for Library Information Technology reports directly to the University Librarian and is a member of the Libraries’ Executive Council contributing to overall strategic planning, program development and evaluation, and the allocation of resources in support of the Libraries’ mission.

This is a senior administrative position responsible for IT planning, the development of system-wide policies and procedures, and the coordination of information technology activities throughout the library system. The Director will supervise a department of 11 staff responsible for desktop support and technical training, systems administration and security/rights management, and applications development. Collaborative and advocacy activities with other library administrators and staff as well as members of the IT community on campus, the state, nationally and internationally are key responsibilities of this position. This Director serves as the Libraries’ liaison to CNI, EDUCAUSE, and similar organizations.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree

• Minimum of 9 years of library information technology experience in a university environment

• Demonstrated knowledge of current trends and best practices in the application of information technology in research libraries and higher education

• Demonstrated experience promoting and working effectively in a diverse environment

• Evidence of highly effective interpersonal and communication skills.

• Evidence of analytical and creative problem-solving skills

• Library-wide perspective and ability to contribute to planning and system-wide administration of the Libraries

• Record of active participation in national pertinent professional associations

While I meet the “minimum requirements” for this position, I am not fully qualified… somewhere in this job’s requirements (maybe not actually written in it) is a healthy desire to live in or near Iowa City (which I do not possess). Still, this is very, very progressive for school of UIowa’s size. They are indicating that if you have spent 9 years of your life working in libraries and have shown the initiative to participate professionally and whatnot, you’re the sort of person who they want on their team. The idea being that the MLS is not a terribly good indicator of skills and (for this sort of position, anyway) may actually limit the pool of good potential candidates they may get.
When I was hired as “Web and Application Development Coordinator” at Emory, they stripped any “faculty-ness” from the position which, in turn, devalued the authority the position had — at least this seemed true in practice. The position could have been pretty similar to that of Iowa’s (I still would have been miserable at it), but the faculty wasn’t quite able to make the leap to label me a “peer”.

Just like my Emory position, though, Iowa is requiring that the position be a “manager” position to get invited to the “career professional” table. There are a lot of librarians at that table who are not managers.

This gap was made evident eariler this week here at Tech. I frequently hear about things going on in the library secondhand due to the fact that I am not faculty. Lord knows how much I never hear. We have a mailing list (lib-fac) where “career professional” sorts of announcements are made and, on Tuesday, a meeting was held for the faculty only to hear people report back what they had learned at ALA Midwinter.

My beef here is, why the faculty only distinction? If they were talking about tenure review or the sorts of things that couldn’t affect me by nature of my employment status that would be one thing. They are talking about things that I would like to know about, however, and could possibly contribute a voice in the discussion. I am not entirely sure why I should be left out.

It’s possible that I could be included just by asking to be. But why am I (or any other staff that has an interest in the profession, for that matter) being excluded in the first place?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s a little discouraging to work to be treated as a peer and a colleague in a national/international community and not in my own organization.

My intention here is not to single out Georgia Tech; this is prevalent throughout libraries everywhere (at least, from what I’ve seen it has). I’m just calling for the possibility of a third caste: those that are making a career in libraries, but have no desire for faculty status (or management).

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Last week I was reading Dorothea Salo’s posting about OCLC’s report on library branding, and it got me to thinking about this a bit.

In particular, I thought about her comment:

I would want to trial-balloon a “Deep Web” play in my next survey, if I were OCLC. I would want to know how many people have heard of the Deep Web, what they think is in it, whether they think information useful to them is in it, whether they would access it through their libraries if they could. This moves away from free-vs.-paid and toward exclusive-vs.-nonexclusive. People like the idea of being privileged. If the library is a place that privileges them, I think they’ll go for it. Special-collections and archives get a boost in this campaign, too; access to rare or unique information is the ultimate in privilege.

I see a tension here. While many push for an “information wants to be free” model, this would, inherently, devalue the role of the organization that makes it free. In fact, to take her quote even farther, this is especially true of special collections and archives.

Allow me to explain.

Users aren’t particularly discriminatory as to where they get their information. Our students or faculty don’t really care if the article or research they are looking at comes to them courtesy of Georgia Tech or if it was found in Citeseer. They are more likely to say they found something in “Google Scholar” vs. the actual institutional repository for the school they are actually getting it from. The more open the information is, the less exclusive our collection becomes and the less leverage and value we hold (at least conforming to our traditional model).

With special collections, this is especially true. Special collections are “special” because they are “unique”. Libraries spend a lot of money curating these collections. Historically, this has enjoyed a fairly good ROI because it distinguishes the library (and therefore, larger institution) as something “special” itself. These materials are exclusive to that particular institution and give value to the collection.

However, there is pressure to digitize and publish these collections. If all of these collections are digitized and published, we have a bunch of silos strewn about the internet requiring the user know about find them to use them. Since it is a lot of work to digitize and mark up these collections, there’s not a terribly good return for the effort.

In an effort to improve findability, the collections need to be aggregated with other similar collections to increase their exposure. However, the result of this is improved awareness and accessibility, but at the same time it dilutes exclusiveness and branding. Whoever provides the aggregation/discovery service gets the benefit of the content, so some of the content providers (inherently) must lose.

So, what does this mean? It should not prevent us from making our collections more open and accessible. That runs counter to our mission. However, we need to start thinking of ways to generate value when our information is free. There are plenty of ways of doing that, such as tailoring services that aggregates the “free” information for our communities, or building systems that can use the information in unique and specialized ways.

There is a large cultural shift that needs to take place to realize this future, however. We still place a lot of emphasis (way too much, really) on the size and uniqueness of our collections. With a world of information available (or a lot of it, at any rate), it’s not so much an issue of how many books you have in your building, but how you are able harness all the good data and present it in useful and meaningful ways. There aren’t easy metrics to this. ARL just can’t count book spines and annual budget. Serious consideration needs to be paid to what and how a library is utilizing the collection outside their walls.

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I woke up at 4:30 this morning.

One could easily write this off to a variety of stresses: an article I have no business writing; a conference I have no business helping organize; a huge project that I am having problems getting started on; a house that I apparently haven’t sunk enough money in to move into yet; a house that I can’t drag far enough away from the railroad tracks to sell; the usual burden that is “the holidays”… sure one could try to pin it on any of those.

But I woke up thinking about (meaning that I was dreaming about) something I read recently from Richard Wallis on Panlibus, Talis’ ‘blog:

Well yes, the current generation of ILS systems were not built with Web Services everywhere. To put it bluntly, who will pay the salaries of the developers who are going to develop these services for you to consume?

Strange thing to dream about, I know. However, when I think about this one quote, it pisses me off to no end. The University System of Georgia pays Endeavor over $500,000 a year for the privilege of running an ILS that they haven’t invested any innovation in years. Granted, we are 35 libraries, so it’s not like we’re all paying that ransom, but, on the flip side, we’re probably also getting a discount for the very fact that we are so large.

Then, to think we are but a percentage of Endeavor’s total customer base…

WHERE IS THAT MONEY GOING, RICHARD?

Of course, I realize that Talis is in no way related to Endeavor, but I cannot imagine their pricing is so radically different that their coffers have no shillings to pay for developers.

Besides, they must already have developers, right? Maybe you need hire developers with vision.

So, to this argument, I call bullshit.

The other thing that struck me (again, apparently in my dream) is the apologetic tone I see quite frequently (recent example here, lots of others floating about) that shifts the blame of our stagnant, crappy Integrated Library Systems to us, the customers instead to our vendors. The argument goes that we, the libraries, have asked for the wrong things for the ILS and the poor vendors (poor, poor vendors) had their hands tied, literally tied, trying to keep up with our demands to be able to incorporate any sort of innovation in the last 15-20 years. Besides, they’d say, if they came up with something different, libraries might not want the change.

What (successful) technology company has ever relied on RFPs for their innovation? Are Google’s hands tied until some customer says, “Hey, can you make a web based ‘maps’ site? You know what we need? A new way to do threaded email.”? How about Intel? Microsoft?

No. These companies realize that they need to innovate to survive. To stagnate or half-ass is the kiss of death. See Novell. For a more dramatic example, see Apple.

No, it’s time we stop taking it like abused spouses from our vendors. You know, maybe we did overcook the porkchop and maybe we do open our mouths too much, but that’s no reason to have a black eye. If a handful of the better funded libraries were to help found something like the Apache Foundation for library software, our abusive husbands might find treat as partners rather than punching bags. I think I might know a good place to look for talent.

(In truth, our rottweiler woke me up, but the dream still stands).

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I really, really hate this Library 2.0 meme for a couple of reasons.

1) All of our problems will not, in fact, be solved with AJAX and web interfaces

2) In fact many of our problems cannot be solved by technology at all (try doing interesting and meaningful and different work with the current body of MARC records out there and see what I mean)

3) This quest for 2.0 would be better served if “2.0″ was a milestone on the journey to “Library 4.5″ — I mean, come on folks, let’s get back into innovating.

4) I think it trivializes some actually exciting and useful work that I fear will continue to fly under the radar because it’s not “Web 2.0″ enough.

Maybe hype is necessary to rally the troops, but I really wish vision would get more attention.

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