Tim Lloyd

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• Tim Lloyd
• Alexander Street Press, L.L.C
• Increasing the visibility of Humanities
  Information in the Marketplace
• Presented at NFAIS, October 14th, 2005

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Overview

• The changing environment
• What to do?
• Linking
• Licensing
• Indexing
• Disciplinary focus
• An example the Music Conductor

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The changing environment
1980 Send out a brochure in the mail. Wait a few
weeks. Make a phone call. Receive an order.
2005 Snail Mailing E-mail campaigns
Advertising Sponsorship Telemarketing
Listservs Blogs Conference attendance Site
visits
1990 Mail out a brochure and a trial form. Take a
trial. Work with the librarian to establish the
trial. Expect sales to follow. Attend a few
shows to help drive sales.
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Whats driving this?
New Products!

• The number of databases in all sectors of the
  market has grown substantially and will grow
  further.
• The noise is simply deafening
• We can expect even more intense competition for
  products and to make things heard.
• New entrants include
• Google Print, Google Scholar, Yahoo! and the
  large search engines
• Institutional repositories
• Amazon? E-Bay? Microsoft?

• One major ARL has told us they spend 1m each
  year on loading local materials online
• At a recent CLIR presentation, the U of Michigan
  outlined how important opening up institutional
  repositories was for them

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What to do?

• Have excellent products (duuhhh ..)
• Linking
• Licensing
• Indexing
• Disciplinary focus
• Champion the Humanities!

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Linking why?

• Well, these new technologies are just that new
• Federated Search works great for apples but not
  for pears
• We deal in pears, bananas, grapefruit etc
• Direct linking allows you to control the
  experience for the user
• You can ensure the context is clear
• You can ensure the result is relevant
• Items that arent linked are less likely to
  participate in the research environment
• Actions
• Ensure you have permanent URLs
• Identify the resources that users want to
  associate with your content (social networking?)

You mean open-URL and Federated
Search? Everything else is old hat, surely?
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Linking

• Benefits
• Increased usage (more access points for users)
• Increased utility (more relevant access points)
• Removes duplication for customers and patrons
  (content appears once)
• Links should be bi-directional

• Watch out for
• Loss of identity (users bypass your interface)
• Loss of control (users may be led to bad
  information or a bad link)
• Possible cannibalization of revenues (users
  realizes other partys content is all they need)
• Cost of creating and maintaining links

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Licensing why?
Licensing just means I lose control without any
clear benefit?

• The fragmentation of markets and information
  channels means youre very unlikely to be able to
  meet the needs of ALL your potential users
  (including the ones you arent aware of!)
• Identify every distinct market for your content
  and see whether you or someone else can do a
  better job
• Beware of licensors that arent distinct theyll
  just compete with each other

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Licensing

• Benefits
• Additional income
• Greater awareness/marketing

• Watch out for
• Channel conflict (users get confused)
• Loss of control (users may see poor
  implementation of your data)
• Possible cannibalization of revenues (is each
  licensor opening a new market, or just
  commoditizing an existing one)

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Logical place to be
Few Links
Free Websites
Refuse to License
Broadly Licensed
Not Licensed
License widely and be a Licensor
License widely
Many Links
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Indexing

• Is the basic way users will navigate the ever
  increasing mountain of data.
• Most of our content is niche in appeal
• The inexperienced student simply wont think to
  look for it
• Indexing is a critical tool to market its
  availability
• Indexing is most powerful when its attached to
  links then it becomes a virtual pathway for
  users to discover, explore and learn its the
  intellectual infrastructure of a discipline.
• Youve listened a composition of spanish
  classical guitar place, force from the early
  20C time and can link to a guitar composition
  from the same period of southern bluegrass

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Disciplinary focus

• At ASP we believe that discipline specific focus
  is and will be critical to long term success.
• Our mutual customers are typically organized
  around disciplines.
• Students, professors, teachers, classes,
  collection development bibliographers all focus
  on specific subjects.
• As the number of databases grow so will the need
  to lend order and focus around disciplines.
• Discipline specific indexing combined with links
  provides the highest visibility for a database
  and/or a content provider
• Its all about relevance

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Music at Alexander Street

• ASP has licensed over 180,000 tracks of music for
  delivery to libraries.
• Offered in an increasing number of packages
• Cross-searchable and interlinked
• Semantically indexed
• Crafted materials from many sources
• Relevance across many departments
• Special controlled vocabularies
• Rare and previously unpublished items

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Value of indexing
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Permanent URLs
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Links to Grove and Wilson

• Browse Bachs Music
• Bach biography on Wilson
• Wilson articles about Bach
• Bach biography on Grove
• Images relating to Bach

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Multiple Access Points

• We have a very successful relationship with the
  Smithsonian that is driven by the additional
  value we add
• We see our role as an enabler of content to work
  in the environment of the web

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Alexander Street Conductor? Reference Indexes
OPAC
Meta-Search
Editorially selected scholarly Web sites and
archives with Alexander Streets Semantic
Indexing added for utility
The essential full-text reference works in the
discipline
Alexander Street collections
The Conductor technology returns one orchestrated
set of search results
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Summary

• We see massive change all around us
• Tivo
• Yellow Pages
• Google
• RSS Feeds vs. E-mail
• Do not call list

Users are increasingly able to limit their
marketing input to whats relevant for them

• Increasingly getting visibility is about making
  what you do part of a collaborative, interlinked
  environment.
• No hard sell, no jargon, no push.

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www.alexanderstreet.com