Secrecy and the Internet

I’ve been following the recent furore about THAT footballer with a wry interest. I’m not particularly interested in the details of his love life, or indeed in football generally, but the way that Twitter has made a nonsense of the Superinjunction does demonstrate that the Internet is not good for secrecy. Another example would be WikiLeaks. Some of the motives behind publication are different: my impression is that WikiLeaks was initially motivated by a combination of anti-US sentiment and idealism, while the footballer furore is celebrity gossip, but  in both cases the Internet has been used to make  information public which other people strived to keep silent. Of course, a common feature in both cases was human nature: the possession of secrets makes us feel privileged, while gossip about them creates insider and outsider groups which promotes belonging and self-worth. Moreover the way that the Internet fosters conspiracy theories demonstrates that information (whether true or false) is made much more available that it once was, so there is much more opportunity for these feelings.

Maybe then, this demonstrates the way that the Internet is changing society. Information literacy – the ability to understand and manipulate information – is becoming more important, and this skill is becoming more widely important across society. Secrecy isn’t going to go away but its promotion and techniques will get cleverer.

Sierra

So III have announced that they are developing a new LMS?????? It is a pity that this was announced only at IUG so all their other customers worldwide get to hear the news second-hand…… To use David Nobbs’ phraseology:  a bit of a cock-up on the publicity front, Innovative.

Truth

A bit of philosophy this time. Sparked by an article in the Guardian last weekend I’ve been musing over the concept of truth in our Internet-centered lives. Arithmetical truth such as 2+2=4 can be said to still exist (unless you’re a quantum physicist) but truth and right and wrong have always been more fluid concepts. One person’s truth is not the same as another’s, so academic practice teaches that you should assess all possible interpretations and synthesize from these.  A core concept of information literacy is therefore that you shouldn’t always believe everything you read, and as librarians we teach cues which help users assess the quality of sources (is it peer-reviewed, from a trusted publisher, etc).  However information literacy often doesn’t get taught until people enter higher education.

Prior to the Internet most people’s exposure to the broader world would have been via newpapers, magazines, TV and radio as well as people they met in the course of their everyday lives. In turn they didn’t have much opportunity to pass on their views to other people. However this is changing. Now they are exposed via the Web to a wider choice of less regulated information sources, and in turn they can express their own opinions to a wider audience (indeed, I’m doing the same here). If you don’t have the skills to assess the information you hear, a simpler truth tends to appear: truth is whatever is shouted loudest (usually with a jabbing finger for emphasis I’ve noticed). This implies that more radical ideas are going to become  prevalent and that as a result society will become less cohesive. Far from being a declining career it looks like librarians (if they choose to accept it) are needed more than ever……..

Talis Library division sold to Capita

You’ll have seen the press release that Talis Information has been sold to Capita Group.  For Capita it is a a useful extension of its existing outsourcing range.

For Talis however, the immediate future seems less clear. It may or may not be significant that the press release that I saw first was the one that  emerged from Talis Group rather than Talis Information or indeed Capita. It must be a rather uncomfortable split for the company as Talis Group retains Talis Aspire, the reading reading list product used widely by HE libraries, as well as other products. As a customer of Aspire, I’m not sure at this stage that I’m clear which of the other products belong on which side of the split.

It is interesting to speculate what this says about the LMS market. It strengthens the idea that the LMS is something that can be outsourced ‘into the cloud’ (in this case a cloud owned by Capita). I wonder what the new owners perspective on the development future for Alto is?  It also poses interesting questions on what direction Talis Group will now take now that it has divested itself of what used to be its core offering?

I have seen a future and its name is Alma…..

Yesterday I went along to the Manchester venue of Ex Libris roadshow exhibiting their new LMS Alma. I came away very impressed. When Ex Libris merged with Endeavour way back in 2006 it was obvious that they needed to concentrate development on one system, but rather than choose one of the two they took the opportunity to rethink what is now needed from an LMS and what modern technology could do to help this.  Alma is therefore more representative of the term Library Management System (or indeed if you speak American, Integrated Library System) then anything else on the market that I’m aware of.

At the moment most libraries have multiple systems to manage resources: an LMS, a link resolver, a federated search system, a discovery system, an electronic resources system, a reading lists system….. etc, etc. This necessitates multiple workflows trying to bridge the gaps between them. However Ex Libris, as a system provider of many of these systems already, saw the opportunity to merge them together to produce a single Library Management System – in its early development phase it was known as the Unified Resource Management System, which I think puts it quite well. This was demonstrated by subscribing to and making available a database package, an activity which would probably previously have involved Metalib, Verde and Aleph (and possibly 3 different people to do this).

The other side of Alma is that it is provided from the ‘cloud’. It is a hosted application using a shared database, which makes maintenance easier for the institution and updates very simple to release. The only software needed is a browser (it was shown running on Chrome) which again makes deployment much easier for the institution. The boundary problems with local IT Services, firewall issues, server support issues, etc are all bypassed. I know this is the direction that OCLC are also heading with their new Web-Scale Management System. Other suppliers already host systems on virtual servers, but this approach doesn’t take advantage of things like a shared bibliographic database that Alma and OCLC can.

So, provided it delivers as planned (and there are already development partners and an early release programme to guarantee this), adoption of Alma seems like a no-brainer to libraries already on Aleph or Voyager.  For the rest of us it is another destabilising factor in the LMS market which was very stable for several years. Note that it needs to be compared with a library running the full suite of applications, so if you are just looking for a new LMS but want to stay with your current link resolver it isn’t what you’re searching for. The other LMS suppliers need to be worried, as we will be asking for the same thing from them.

An interesting comparison that was on my mind was with OS LMS. These are an emerging market sector, and there has been discussion recently on the LIS-OSS email list about their role. Alma clearly differentiates what a commercial supplier such as Ex Libris can provide compared with a community-developed system such as Koha or Evergreen. I don’t know whether OS is able to provide the ‘added value’ that a link resolver can give, for example. To provide something equivalent using OS where possible might therefore be to build a blended system using both OS and commercial elements. However in that case the library has to be the ringmaster tying the elements together, and many libraries no longer have the kind of skills in-house. Therefore Alma becomes an even more attractive way of outsourcing some difficult work. Perhaps there’s a facilitating role for a company to provide a ‘half-way’ house, or maybe that would just miss the benefits of both sides….?

Perceptions of Libraries

Just read an excellent post from Carl Grant of Ex Libris about OCLC’s ‘Perceptions of libraries 2010‘ report. Academic libraries need to change, and that change needs to come fast.  Although the report is based on US data and Carl’s view is from the Ex Libris perspective, this lesson applies as much in the UK as the US. He talks of a revolution not evolution being needed in libraries today. There is a growing disconnect between libraries and users, and librarians are failing to realise this.

So what should we be doing? This is less clear, as is inevitable, but he does say:

We must meet the end-user on their terms, delivering information to the interface of their choice, at the place, time and format of their choosing.

For me as a systems manager this means things like single search boxes covering all library resources, smartphone interfaces and external availability of data.

But we must also be recognised as delivering this information: too often users don’t realise that the library has made available the database from which they have just skimmed an article – the information is just ‘out there’ and the user found it via Google. Even worse, our funders don’t understand this. Hence there’s a difficult job there of both branding information and making it easy to find and use. It isn’t just a challenge for the systems managers but for the subject librarians (student and faculty facing) and the library managers (university management facing)  so demands fundamental change at all levels.

Government plans for Universities

There’s an excellent opinion piece in todays Times Higher on the events in London last month. I’m not sure I agree with every word, but it points out how the media has been manipulated to accentuate the unfortunate violence at the student demonstrations in London while ignoring the very real concerns of the demonstrators. For over a decade young people have been told they should go to University if they wanted to be successful, and it has become almost an expected part of growing up for a large part of the population. Now the process has been made much more difficult for them, and not surprisingly they’ve reacted. Big changes in a short space of time inevitably cause social unrest, and happen in an uneven way with unpredictable effects on other parts of society.

Higher Education libraries

Fascinating article on the BBC website today about HE libraries without books.  Even better, it takes a fairly considered perspective, instead of seeking cheap headlines as do most of the new articles on this subject. The direction that HE libraries are taking seems clear, with more eresources and less paper, but the consequences of this are less so. At the moment libraries still seem to be valued as a physical place to work, but if there’s no longer a reason to maintain a large expensive building, students are either likely to be directed to cheaper environments or expected to study at home. The examples of new libraries given in the article all have significantly less capacity than their predecessors.

As a librarian, I was also glad to see that the article recognises that librarians still have a role to play. Many people link librarians just to books rather than to information, which is a sad misunderstanding of what librarians do. There are important roles played by librarians that many people (including some academics and IT Services staff) don’t see, in selecting and organising resources as well as in helping people to understand and use information.

But cost saving is also mentioned, and cutting costs is a focus of the current UK government at the moment (in all areas, not just HE).  Cheaper education is indeed possible at a distance using planned learning, with digitised/ born digital resources and VLEs and remote support available where necessary – just look at the success of the Open University. But the result of this is an educational experience very different from that of the last century, where students actually got to know and speak personally to their educators, and by the experience of searching for information in less well-indexed times grew more familiar with their overall field of study. Moreover by living away from home in an entirely different environment their mental horizons were changed in a way that is happening less in the modern HE world. The educational experience is thus very different and in turn is bound to have an influence on the society which these people in their turn contribute to forming.  Information is changing society in ways we can only speculate about.

OCLC ‘Making partnerships mattter’

I was at OCLC’s ‘Making partnerships matter’ event in Birmingham on Tuesday and came away quite impressed. The title of the day for me didn’t really cover what I got out of it – they were talking about WorldCat Local and what they’re calling ‘Web-scale management services’.

WorldCat Local seems quite impressive: it leverages OCLC’s existing information sources WorldCat and extensive links to eresources, to create an interesting alternative to other Resource Discovery systems. Of course, the big question is the coverage of the pre-indexed material, and there seems no easy way of comparing this with alternatives such as EDS, Summon, Encore Synergy or Primo Central. But the feedback from their only UK customer so far, York St John University, seemed good,  and the recognition that federated searching still has a role to play to ensure completeness was welcome.  I’ll be looking at this in more detail – providing that the outcome of the Browne Report and CSR don’t preclude it……

Although WorldCat Local is part of OCLC’s move to ‘Web-scale management’, in a way the latter is more long-term. They’ve taken the logical step to realising that as it is now possible for an LMS supplier to remotely-host an LMS,  it might actually be more efficient to run the LMS in ‘the Cloud’. In other words, instead of multiple completely independent systems,  separating only the data rather than the functionality. They’re still in fairly early days yet – Circulation and Acquisitions are being beta-tested in several member libraries – but this looks an interesting alternative. Many libraries are having issues supporting their own LMS due to uncooperative local IT departments (don’t get me started ) and lack of funding for their own staff, and so to outsource this to a resource which understands libraries seems sensible.

Overall a very good day, not least because it was my first visit to OCLC’s third Bimingham office in the past 20 years!

Resource Discovery

Like a lot of HE libraries, Resource Discovery interfaces are on our minds at the moment. I attended the EIUG Exchange of Experience Day at Warwick a few weeks ago and saw demonstrations of Summon, EDS, Encore and Aquabrowser. I’ve also been up to Huddersfield to see their Summon installation and had other demos of Encore and Primo elsewhere. But I’m still confused as to the best match for our users.

From looking at their searches on the OPAC (III’s WebPac is pretty good at showing these) I can see that users search skills in general, despite the extensive work we put into information literacy training, are fairly low. Keyword searches on entire essay titles are common (do they develop amnesia after leaving the induction sessions? ). Users also tell us that they don’t want to have to search in multiple places (eg the OPAC plus 4 or 5 online databases) and then bring together and de-duplicate the results themselves. After the simplicity of using Google they are not prepared to invest this kind of time and work into finding academic resources. Instead they want a single search box which does it all: it must concurrently search all the academic resources to which the University Library provides access, deduplicate and present the results in a usable relevance-ranked order, providing links to full-text wherever available. Better search facilities would also be good – the graphical concept map which Aquabrowser gives is impressive.

But few of the current Resource Discovery systems do all of this at the moment. Summon and EDS allow you to search on the OPAC plus a subset of resources which they’ve indexed (the impression I have is that EBSCOs coverage of academic resources is better but I have no evidence to support this). Moreover as the parent companies maintain the indexes and infrastructure they are relatively low-overhead. But they don’t index all of the expensive databases we pay for, so the results are still only partial. Encore and Primo get round this by retaining federated search and including this in the results as well, although at a greater financial cost and slower search results.  But maintaining all the infrastructure behind this also adds to the work for the library, and at a time when libraries are trying to ‘do more with less’ this is hardly welcome.

There are of course systems I’ve not really looked at yet, such as OCLC’s WorldCat Local and SirsiDynix’s Enterprise, although I do have the impression that they share some of the above features and weaknesses. Looks like I’ve got a lot more work to do….  So have the suppliers – as most libraries have a similar need their product development depts must be on overtime!