Transcript Programs and Research Moving to the network level: discovery and disclosure Lorcan Dempsey ALCTS ALA Midwinter, Seattle January 19 2007

Programs and Research
Moving to the network
level:
discovery and disclosure
Lorcan Dempsey
ALCTS
ALA Midwinter, Seattle
January 19 2007
The network rewrites
behaviors
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A few things….
 Workflow and Attention
 Aggregation of demand and suppy: the long tail
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~18 months old
No FaceBook, MySpace
Library?
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University of Minnesota
http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/KM%20JStor%20Presentation.pps
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Netvibes, onfolio, my yahoo, myspace, RSS aggregator, …
Self assembled digital identity
Prefabricated (e.g. CMS)
Database > website > workflow
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Workflow
 Then
 Users built workflow around the library
 Now
 The library must build its services around user workflow
Get into the flow
Disclose into other environments
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Attention
 Then
 Resources scarce, attention abundant
 Now
 Attention scarce, resources abundant
Competition for attention
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Long tail information providers
Systemwide
efficiences
Aggregation of supply
•Unified discovery
•Low transaction costs
Aggregation of demand
Impact?
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Libraries and the long tail dynamic
Each book
its reader
Each reader
his/her book
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Aggregate supply?
 1.7% of circulations are ILLs
 (60% of aggregate G5
collection owned by one
library only)
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Aggregate demand?
 20% of collection accounted
for 90% of use
 (2 research libraries over ~4
years)
Note: All statistics are
preliminary and subject
to change. Final report
forthcoming soon.
The Library Long Tail
Number of Holdings
(using holdings as measure of popularity)
“Head”
Figure not drawn to scale;
for illustration purposes only
“Long Tail”
Items ranked by system-wide popularity
Head:
Top 10% of WorldCat records (ranked by holdings)
account for 80% of total WorldCat holdings
Long Tail:
Bottom 90% of WorldCat records (ranked by holdings)
account for 20% of total WorldCat holdings
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Note: All statistics are
preliminary and subject
to change. Final report
forthcoming soon.
ILL and the Long Tail
(FY 2005 OCLC ILL transactions)
Number of Holdings
~75% of ILL requests were
directed at the “Head”
~25% of ILL requests were
directed at the “Long Tail”
Items ranked by system-wide popularity
By comparison, Chris Anderson (The Long Tail, 2006) reports:
Amazon: ~ 25% of sales from the “long tail”
Netflix: ~ 20% of sales from the “long tail”
* Question: are current ILL systems adequately supporting
demand for the library long tail?
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For many years,
Chinese people
cited a proverb:
if the wine
smells really
wonderful,
customers will
come in spite of
the length of the
lane.
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The network rewrites the library:
discovery and disclosure
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Chris Beckett
http://www.scholinfo.com/presentations/2006/8/10/the-new-world-order-in-collection-development-the-commercial-perspective.html
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Discovery:
focus on catalog with some related …
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Local Discovery Environments
Shared Discovery Environments
Syndicated Discovery Environments
Leveraged Discovery Environments
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Local Discovery environment
 Some (not necessarily aligned) motivations
 Make data work harder
 Integrate access to locally managed resources
 Escape from ILS limitations
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NCSU
Rochester
SOLR
Worldcat 2.0
Primo
Encore …
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Some remarks
 How does MARC data play with other data
 Subjects, authors, ..
 Historic investment in structure?
 Duplicate cost?
 Relationship to Metasearch?
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Shared discovery environment
 Increase impact
 Create gravitational pull
 Aggregate demand and supply
 Reduce costs
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Some comments
 Integration of discovery to delivery becoming
essential
 A move to shared environments seems more
likely with increased ability to ‘view’ different
levels
 Increased gravitational pull: greater use of
collections
 Growing evidence
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Syndicated discovery experience
 Syndicate data or service or links
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Syndicating services
 RSS
 Portlets
 APIs, Protocol-based
 Projects
 Sakailibrary
 …
Not as rapid as one might expect?
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Some remarks
 Syndication of data now common among data
providers
 Routing issue for non-unique materials
 Resolution
 Worldcat
 Libraries exposing licensed content holdings
interesting
 Google Scholar
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 Service disclosure less common
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APIs
Web services
Portlets
HTML fragments – ‘search boxes’
Toolbars
Widgets, extensions, …
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The Leveraged discovery experience
 In some ways the most interesting
 Use another discovery service to connect back to
your resources
 Compare to the situation with article databases
and resolvers
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Click
– look in OCLC Resolver Registry
– pass through to the relevant library
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Some remarks
 Some of these are toy-like now, but indicate a
direction
 Increased capacity to ‘sense’ structure
(microformats) will improve ability.
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So ….
 The library website is not the front door
 We need to connect multiple discovery environments to
library fulfilment options
 We need to put library resources in users’ workflow
 We need to place library resources in places which
aggregate demand
 Need more robust machine interfaces for the ILS
so that we can put its functionality in other places
(medium term)
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And OCLC ….
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