Talis Keystone

I was at the Talis Integration Day yesterday, at Talis‘ new offices (new to me, anyway!). We looked at the issue of integrating the LMS with other institutional systems, and of course at Talis Keystone, their module for facilitating this.

It seemed a very logical long-term path to take, the Babelfish route for the Hitchhikers amongst us. Currently most of us can make use of APIs to link to other systems (eg the student database, the university finance system), but this code then has to be completely rewritten when either system changes. In between the 2 APIs there are often also multiple in-house scripts, which are sometimes ill-documented and fail if their author leaves the institution. By using XML and Web Services, when there is a system change only the translator component of Keystone which handles the conversion to XML has to change. The rest of the system doesn’t need to be rewritten. This makes it much more sustainable and allows re-use of code in multiple places.  Its a much more elegant way of moving forward.

The Talis staff acknowledged that the system itself can only handle half the problem however: getting both partners to an integration exercise to agree to it and to how it would work is not easy. Talis will of course also help with this as part of their business consultancy, but just getting university silos to talk to each other to agree that some data sharing would be beneficial to both sides is not easy, as I know from experience. The fact that their system only provides the glue that binds the 2 systems rather than (necessarily) the end-user interface was also a difficult idea for some people used to working with the LMS itself,  to come to terms with.

The need for integration of business systems is however in my mind a no-brainer. A 21st century University cannot continue to exist as a series of silos that are just connected by a central-heating system. Students are demanding an integrated experience from Universities and don’t have the patience to cope with multiple ways of doing things. No single university business systems product combining LMS, finance, student records, etc is available (and I doubt one could be made to be successfull in all areas) so the best alternative is to integrate them via software, and Talis is unusual in its maket sector for providing a product which does that.

Kindle launched in UK

After a long time waiting, the Amazon Kindle is now available for order on the international market, according to their UK website today. They will be supplied from the US after 19th October.

There’s a very interesting sentence in the advert:

“Our vision for Kindle for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds”.

A very high aim, but I wonder how long it will be before our students are expecting us to populate their Kindles for them?

SirsiDynix in court

As I’m no longer a SirsiDynix customer I’ve avoided thus far any comment on matters Horizon/Unicorn/Symphony. However a lawsuit has arisen in the US which could have interesting implications worldwide, so I’ve broken my own rule.

My reading of the situation is thus: the Queens Borough Public Library in New York needed a new ILS and after an exhaustive evaluation in 2005 of what was currently available and promised, they chose Horizon 8.0. Of course, as we all know Horizon 8.0 was aborted, and Sirsi ‘merged’ with Dynix to form SirsiDynix. They changed product direction, stopped development work on the Horizon platform and instead pushed a ‘new’ system called Symphony, based heavily on Sirsi Unicorn. For a number of reasons, Queens Borough has found Symphony unsuitable for their needs and so has chosen to go to the law courts as they felt the company wasn’t delivering what was promised.

A number of other libraries who were in the same position took other routes: some adopted Symphony and several others abandoned SirsiDynix entirely and went to other LMS vendors.  I believe there are other libraries who still haven’t made a decision. Full details of the complaint are on the invaluable LibraryTechnology site here.

The implications are interesting.

• For it to get to court must mean that Queens Borough and SD were unable to come to agreement, which is serious in view of the expense of legal procedure.
• PR-wise it extends the bad press that SD got from its development path volte-face and stops it becoming old news. This in turn hinders sales as potential customers might prefer not to buy from a company facing complaints from existing customers in court.
• If successfull it also means that SD could face other similar claims from other customers.

Shareholders in SirsiDynix’s parent company will not be happy…..

Uncertainty in the Koha community

There seems to be some unfortunate discord in the Koha community.  As an outside observer I’m not familiar with all the detail, but it seems that Liblime, who support it in the US, have announced that they want to centralise on one development platform, to be called Liblime Enterprise Koha. Some parts of the Koha user community, already concerned about Liblime’s trademarking of the name ‘Koha’,  have expressed concern about this, seeing  it as a development fork. Liblime have said that all their code will remain open-source, but there seems to be some uncertainty about the nature of this.  Very sensibly, Marshall Breeding has proposed a review of the governance of the Koha project to focus more on the libraries than the developers.

As an outside observer it is interesting to watch this from outside. As Breeding points out, the scale of usage had outgrown the development community and needs review. A similar thing happened with Linux and Red Hat some years ago. Hopefully some solution will be found as similar problems are likely to occur with other other Open Source systems.

“Information wants to be free…….”

“…so I can sell it”

Capital letters

There’s a story on the BBC news website about someone losing their job for using capital letters in emails for emphasis. We’ve all seen it – someone who believes their own part of the universe is more important than any other part and so sends bombastic emails.  And somehow it is easier to be bombastic via email than on the phone or in person, probably because the other person has no chance of immediate reply….

However it brings to mind another aspect of human behaviour which has always puzzled me. Why do students always turn on the caps lock before typing in their searches on the catalogue? As far as I know, no LMS differentiates between upper and lower case (probably for this reason), and Google certainly doesn’t by default. Yet I see it everyday – if a catalogue PC is rebooted, within a few minutes somebody has come along and turned on the caps lock (or even worse, is laboriously typing with one finger on the shift key!). This isn’t happening in just my current library either – user behaviour was the same in the the previous 3 libraries I’ve worked. As I said, it doesn’t really matter to the system, but I just don’t understand why it happens?????

Twitter and pointless babble

There’s a wonderful story on the BBC news website about a survey by Pear Analytics indicating that 40% of messages on Twitter are ‘pointless babble’, 37% of messages are conversational ( ie they might be more easily conducted by email or instant messaging) and only 9% is of ‘pass-along’ value (ie it might be more effectively transmitted as a blog). As a Twitter sceptic  I’m surprised the babble figure is as low as that…..  Admittedly surveys have shown that blogs are not without their faults, but for me the fact that there are several long-standing blogs I monitor via Bloglines indicates that the medium works for me.  It may be my age, but even as a self-proclaimed  Internet-native I’m still to find any reason to use Twitter…..

Possibly the added value of Twitter is that the 140 character word limit fits nicely onto a mobile phone screen – a new form of texting, in other words. That would explain why it doesn’t attract me as much as others, as I discovered the Internet long before I got my first mobile.  In which case, as mobile phones grown more sophisticated and get larger screens, will Twitter move to longer messages or will the ‘Twitterati’ move on?

Ex Libris announces Primo Central

Late to the party as usual, I’ve just come across Primo Central. According to Ex Libris press release this is “a centralized, hosted Primo® index that covers data harvested from primary and  secondary publishers and aggregators”. In other words, when your users do a Primo search they get to search not only all the resources you’ve added yourself, but also many more which are selected by Ex Libris, to give a merged de-duped results set of both local and remote materials of good quality.  Ex Libris are doing the job most libraries don’t have the staff to do, of harvesting remote resources. The effect of course is that your users then get better results, which benefits them and gains kudos for the library!

This is of course only an extension to what Ex Libris already do – the SFX and Metalib knowledge bases have long provided a set of free resources, but extending this to publishers like EBSCO, IOPP, etc and  tying it in with Primo is I think a big step in making information retrieval easier for our users. My library doesn’t have the funds to purchase federated or vertical search products at the moment, but if we did it makes us more likely to choose the Ex Libris offerings (which is of course Ex Libris ultimate aim!). There is an added cost of  course, and I haven’t seen any indicative prices in the literature I’ve seen, but little comes for free these days.

To some extent it seems like a library reaction to initiatives like Google Scholar: although Google Scholar is a great tool it has never involved the library community as fully as it might, while Primo Central brings things much more under library control and branding. I wonder if other suppliers will react to compete with it?

Govt goes Twitter…

Most amused to read this morning that the Cabinet Office is urging other government departments to start twittering. It is all to improve its communication apparently. Even better, although Twitter is limited to 140 characters, this guidance has come out in a 20 page document…..

I’m afraid I’m rather sceptical of the idea. I don’t think many civil servants, used to producing the massive volumes of paperwork that fuel most bureaucracies, could limit themselves to 140 characters. And if they did, how would the rest of us find the facts behind the political spin? It seems to me more like the govt is trying to appear to be keeping up with current trends without fully understanding them (maybe better than sitting back, doing things the same way as it alway has and trying to ignore them, as it often does!). Most twitter feeds (and most blogs) don’t last more than a few days or a few weeks as their authors either get tired of writing them, or realise that nobody is reading them. Information overflow is forcing us all to limit what we follow, and positive spin from govt depts wouldn’t be my priority.  Twitter is just the current trend, and like Facebook is going to become just another part of the Internet revolution once the next trend comes along. Only when that happens will we see whether Twitter has lasting value. The trick is to identify the next trend….

E-Books and ownership

Kindle e-book reader

A rather interesting story has just emerged about Amazon’s Kindle and e-book versions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. There is a well-researched account of it at Copyfight. From my reading of this, Amazon distributed the e-books and then found out that the third party which had made them available via the Kindle store didn’t have the rights necessary to make them available. Hence Amazon pulled them from the store, removed them from user’s Kindles and gave them a refund.

I don’t own a Kindle, but if I did I would be worried when I found that something I thought I’d bought was removed from my device without asking me. That ‘purchase’ of an e-book becomes something more like a ‘license to view’, and even the ‘ownership’ of an e-book reader becomes questionable when Amazon can access it and delete items without authorisation. However on the other hand,  as the e-books weren’t fully legal they were in a sense stolen property, and as such the moral rights become blurred. I wouldn’t claim to be a lawyer and I would imagine that Amazon must have taken legal advice before taking any action.  In my own mind I’m undecided where rights here should lie – I sympathise with the people who bought the e-books in good faith, but I can also understand that this was a breach of copyright.  I wonder how many more new questions of this kind await us as we move to new forms of media?