Inequality

There were some shocking statistics in Saturdays Grauniad. These came originally from the Office for National Statistics. The top 10% of the UK population now owns 45% of the country’s private wealth. The bottom half shares just 9%. Since the previous survey only 2 years earlier that top 10% has seen a 21% rise in wealth. Research by organisations such as the Equality Trust has shown that such disparity leads to poor health, reduced social mobility, increased crime, economic instability and many other factors, but perhaps because opinion is dominated by that same 10% the divides continues to widen.

Takeover day

In the space of a few hours yesterday I heard of 2 big takeovers which will affect both my own library and the UK HE library sector in a big way.

The first was Proquest’s takeover of Ex Libris. My jaw hit the carpet on this one. Ex Libris are to become ‘Ex Libris, a Proquest company’. The press releases emphasise a ‘steady as you go’ strategy with no sudden changes to product roadmaps or Ex Libris’ content neutrality, but in the long term product duplication would draw this into question. Way back in the past when we looking for a ‘ discovery’ system my library looked at both Primo and Summon. There is also duplication in link resolvers, ERMS, and, with the work Proquest has put into Intota, in the LMS itself. Perhaps Proquest will pursue the VAG strategy (avoiding diesel engines!) whereby convergence happens ‘under the hood’ while the surface level of the products remains different? My library is a strong customer of both companies so we will watching this very carefully.

The second takeover has been less publicised: I heard of it via Mick Fortune’s RFID email list. Bibliotheca have acquired 3M’s library systems business. I’ve heard nothing from 3M despite my library being a long-term customer (which perhaps doesn’t bode well?). Again, a ‘no change’ strategy is implied from the press release. Bibliotheca are one of the growing players in the UK HE market, and actively involved in developments like the new LCF Framework so it might be a good thing in the long run. However for my library with ageing security gates and self-service equipment I worry slightly whether 3M’s hitherto good maintenance standards will decline. There has been some discussion on the RFID list about the size of market share it will give to Bibliotheca, but with the UK’s small market size any convergence would be likely to give rise to this kind of worry.

These things tend to come in 3s: has anything else happened recently I’m not aware of?

Latest Perceptions survey results now available

The results from Marshall Breeding’s latest Perceptions survey are now available. As it shows, many libraries using Millennium are now thinking of moving on, and my library is no exception. As this is a worldwide survey run from the US with the majority of replies coming from US libraries it needs some interpretation for a UK library, but as with its predecessors the results are invaluable.It will be very useful to us and to other libraries in the same position. Thanks Marshall!

Here we go again……

In what I at first thought was an April Fool, Innovative yesterday announced the purchase of Polaris Library Systems. I believe this is their first purchase since SLS, way back in 1997, which led to them getting into the UK LMS market. As ever, the best analysis of this that I’ve come across so far is from Marshall Breeding. The takeover surely reflects the change of ownership of III from Jerry Kline to 2 private equity firms, Huntsman Gay Global Capital and JMI Equity, which took place a couple of years ago.

As an LMS Manager my first thought is what does it mean for users of Millennium, Sierra or indeed Polaris? I have to confess some cynicism, as I was managing a Horizon system at the time of the Sirsi-Dynix merger, which led to the combined company losing customers and the abandonment of development work on the Horizon-replacement Corinthian. However such mergers can work: as an outsider it looks to me as if the Ex Libris/ Voyager merger has led to the development of Alma, which looks like an excellent system (as I hope the British Library and Library of Congress would agree!).

In the past III and Polaris were never full competitors: although III does have public library customers its main focus was on the academic sector, and although Polaris has a few academic libraries its main focus was on public libraries. Nor does Polaris have many customers outside the North American continent. The combined company therefore has a stronger system to offer public libraries outside North America, which may help market penetration. Polaris also has a good reputation for customer service, while from personal experience  III’s seems good in the main, but with an irritating habit of charging extra for functionality that ‘ought’ to be in the standard product. Hopefully a greater stress on customer service might therefore benefit current III customers.

System-wise Polaris seems to be Microsoft-based, while III is moving towards Linux and Postgres, so there isn’t an obvious match there. However if you look at it in more detail both are also working on web-based functionality, and indeed Marshall Breeding suggests that Polaris might have technology which III could usefully employ. In the Press Release there is some mention of a “a shared vision of a cloud-based computing future” and a “next-generation unified platform”, which suggests an eventual merger of the 2 systems. Perhaps the database layer is of less importance that it once was.

The next EIUG conference in June is looking more and more important!

Innovative 4for14

I went along to the Innovative 4for14 event at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds yesterday, and found a very different company to the one I’ve been working with for several years now. In the past, III staff were always highly knowledgeable about libraries and their software, but slightly less comfortable talking about theoretical areas such as how libraries are changing and how user and technological trends would influence them. Perhaps this represented the ‘black box’ nature of the old core product Millennium. However yesterday the reverse seemed to be true. The four themes which seemed to come out of discussions were Technology, Sharing, Partnerships and Change, whereas discussion was almost steered away from  the details of software functionality which would previously have been the focus. Maybe this just reflects Sierra, with its more open APIs? I await the next EIUG conference in Edinburgh to find out!

Michael Gove and World War 1

With the anniversary of the start of World War 1 approaching, the Education Secretary Michael Gove has criticised the ‘left-wing’ for creating ‘myths’ about the reasons why the war started and how it was conducted. He would prefer to see it as a ‘just war’ to ‘combat aggression by a German elite bent on domination’. Not surprisingly the former Cambridge historian and now Stoke Labour MP Tristram Hunt has criticised Gove’s argument as a  ‘simplistic’ and ‘crass’ attempt to ‘rewrite the historical record and sow political division’. He has been backed up by popular TV historian Tony Robinson, who describes Gove’s argument as an ‘unhelpful’ and ‘irresponsible’ attempt to ‘slag off teachers’. From the rumblings on the radio news this morning I suspect this won’t be the last we hear of this debate.

Standing back for a moment however, aren’t we just seeing here an example of that truism ‘History is written by the victors”? Gove is Education Minister and is rewriting the history curriculum. Not surprisingly he is rewriting it from his own perspective, and that perspective is Conservative, with its connotations of nationalism, patriotism and a public-school attitude. No matter whether the facts are more complex than he admits, if he (or his party) can establish ‘ownership’ of the Wordl War 1 commemorations and portray those of different opinions as snide and unpatriotic the facts become  less important.

Of course the manipulation of history to suit those in power is nothing new – just read the Greek historian Herodotus for this. But how this might change, or indeed whether it will, in our age of connectedness, remains to be seen.

 

Discovery systems

I’ve come to realise that Resource Discovery Systems / next-gen catalogues /etc are seen as a good idea by library users but not necessarily so by content providers. There’s a discussion of this in Carl Grant’s latest blog entry ‘Do they or don’t they?‘ – well worth a read with some pretty big implications……

Dump the OPAC???????

I thought Dave Pattern had been quiet lately – he’s just been working up to something:

http://www.daveyp.com/blog/archives/1863

Some fascinating ideas which I’ll be watching closely. Luckily Keele isn’t in quite the same position as Huddersfield, so we’re able to take things more slowly.

 

Google Books

I saw a rather good documentary, Google and the world brain on BBC4 the other night. If you didn’t catch it I can recommend it. It was intelligent,well made, and allowed the viewer to draw his/her own conclusions.

The subject matter was Google Books. Google seems to have surrounded this with layers of legalistic secrecy that are bound to incur suspicion even if this isn’t actually justified. Several of the talking heads mentioned that they’d been told to sign non-disclosure agreements and there was one scene where the librarian of a monastic library just stopped speaking in obvious confusion about what he could or couldn’t say.  This was exacerbated by Google US’s odd decision not to participate in the programme (and yet one of their Spanish staff did do so?)

Yet the logic of Google Books seems clear. As a librarian I’m all for free availability of information, and it seems obvious that a search engine provider would want to add ever more information to their database to improve the quality of the answer. I think it was the fact that the digitisation puts the scanned images into the control of one organisation that drew most suspicion. Can we trust one organisation to do this fairly? The jury is out on that one.

The other objections were equally predictable. The programme painted a perhaps unfair picture of the nationalistic objections from the former head of the Bibliotheque Nationale. However the objection which has done most to hinder the original aims of the Google Books project is copyright. Up until recently Google Books was scanning in-copyright books but said that this was legal because of the ‘fair use’ clause in copyright law.  Due to legal actions they’ve now stopped this and are scanning only books outside copyright (even though the laws which define what is and isn’t copyright aren’t exactly universal either!).

The programme touched on the murky world of copyright. Both sides of the argument were presented: that knowledge itself can’t be held to be private and so only the author’s arrangement of the words is copyright-able, versus the argument that if an author has spent a year or more of his/her time creating a book they deserve some kind of recognition and reward for this. Much can be said on this and opinions are very entrenched so I won’t say any more!

Another aspect of the programme which deserves further exploration is Google’s motives in developing Google Books. It is costing them millions of dollars. Improving the search engine is an obvious aim, but also mentioned was an aspiration towards Artificial Intelligence. There were several quotations from H.G. Wells musing on the World Brain. However the acquisition of knowledge is not the same thing as being able to use that knowledge logically, fairly and morally (just look at many of the occupants of the House of Commons for evidence of that!). If Google is working towards AI, then the ‘thinking brain’ must be another one of those Google side-projects, some of which blossom (like Android), and others which never go anywhere. Of course if they are working on AI they are not alone, as there are many projects of this nature around the world, some overt and sharing their results in the scientific principle, but doubtless others which are under the radar. But I suspect that Google’s slightly quirky approach to development might have led them further down the road than others which are less free to question doctrine. Google Search was a game-changer when it emerged, but an adaptable AI which could operate outside very closely defined parameters might well be a society-changer. ….

Course reading

For a while now I’ve thought that libraries will eventually be involved in supplying textbooks to individual students as well as having copies for loan, and a number of recent developments have suggested that this is now beginning to happen.  A new joint pilot venture between Ingrams and Coventry University will supply first year undergraduates at Coventry with their textbooks free as part of their course fees. As an alternative model a number of publishers are working with JISC on an e-textbook model which will be available to all students on a module for that duration of that module. Lastly, at the recent Dawsons Day in Manchester I heard how Dawsons had worked with the UEA library to supply students with course textbooks. Of course, this is what the Open University has been doing for some courses for years (and as a former OU student I’m very aware of how much easier it makes life for the part-time off-campus student!) but it is now happening for full time students as well.

This indicates some interesting directions for UK Higher Education. As shown by the rise of reading list software such as Talis Aspire and rebus: list the reading list is becoming more central to the learning process.  Students are reading only what is on the module reading lists (‘plus ca change..’ some might say). However in this fee-driven environment, students do not view textbooks as an unavoidable expense. Instead they expect libraries to buy them in sufficient numbers for all students on a module to access a copy whenever they want. This is financially impossible for most libraries, and of course was causing a decline in sales for publishers. Therefore, assuming that the cost is not coming from normal library funds, the model of supplying textbooks as part of the course fees works to the benefit of  the students, the library and the bookseller. Moreover, if the university represents it as a benefit to the student, it possibly gets it some competitive advantage to its rivals (ie other universities which don’t do this). This works for both paper and ebooks, and indeed the logistics makes the latter prefereable from the point of view of the supplier. As it is already highly experienced in dealing with book suppliers and copyright law, the library is the obvious part of the university to play the role of arranging all this (possibly in co-operation with IT if the loading of ebooks onto devices is envisaged).

Of course, these ideas may seem like nonsense to many in other parts of the world. I was recently talking to 2 american librarians who told me that their library has very few copies of textbooks, and that students expect that they must purchase their own textbooks. I can only guess at the reasons for the difference in student attitudes (but it does help to explain what has been a great mystery to UK library staff who have to work with US LMS designed with little understanding of why or how a ‘Short Loan’ collection is run or why it is even needed!).